3 out of 4 stars
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The Altitude Journals chronicles seven years of David Mauro’s life as he faces challenges in his forties, from his divorce to Jenny to the rocky relationship with his father Don. In this autobiography, David faces a calling to climb the seven summits, which allows him to mend and move on from the parts of his life that are falling apart. As he chronicles his personal journey of redemption, David is able to find love again and fix his life while overcoming the dangerous challenges mountain climbing entails.
I really enjoyed the format of this book. I liked that David told his story through journal entries and shared some of his most personal moments with us. I also loved the subheadings found in the journal entries because they give the reader a hint of what topic is going to be talked about. I also loved seeing the photographs he included. It made his journal seem all the more personal and made me yearn to see more of them.
I also found this book to be a very informative read. As someone who doesn’t know a whole lot about mountain climbing, I found myself learning about it from this book. One example of something I learned that comes to mind for me is that you can get illnesses as you get up to higher altitudes that each present their own dangers. You as the reader saw several people in the book who dealt with some of these illnesses and how it affected them as they tried to summit. Learning this information made reading this book that much more enjoyable because I was learning something from it. It also allowed the reader if they were curious about mountain climbing to learn some of the risks before committing to doing a climb themselves.
One of my favorite aspects of this book is David’s narrating. There were times when the story was getting dark and he’d include moments that made me chuckle. These moments lightened the mood and made me root for him to overcome every obstacle he encountered.
While I didn’t find too many grammatical errors, my biggest problem with this book was being required to read it as a PDF format. I wasn’t too keen on it because whenever I’d turn my tablet off, it wouldn’t mark the page where I stopped reading. So I’d have to scroll through until I was back where I left off. I also noticed in this format that there were a lot of blank pages. I noticed them when I first started reading and as I finished reading about each mountain. It didn’t contribute to me liking the story any less, but it was noticeable enough for me to mention. As such, I give this book 3 out of 4 stars.
I also wish he’d included more photographs because I wanted to experience the mountains he saw. The pictures he did include were nice, but I wanted to see more of them.
Overall, The Altitude Journals is a great nonfiction read. I highly recommend it to mountain climbers and anyone with an interest in adventure and travel.
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The Altitude Journals
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