For anyone who saw the Imax movie Everest or read Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air, there is an unforgettable image of a shadowy, nearly dead figure lurching and stumbling out of an intense blizzard, disfigured by a frozen face and disabled by frozen hands, blinded, horribly wounded but alive, against all odds.

That appalling figure was Beck Weathers, the author of this surprisingly cheerful book. Weathers was left for dead not once but twice during the disastrous day in 1996 which left nine climbers dead on on the mountain. Part of one hand was saved, his nose was reconstructed surgically, and his sight came back before he left Everest, but his climbing days are finished.

What drove Beck Weathers up that unforgiving mountain in the first place? He used the ferocious concentration, the fellowship created by shared dangers, and the imperatives of invited emergency conditions of mountain climbing to ward off his black dog of clinical depression.

In escaping his depression, he also beat back the emotional entanglements of wife and children, to the point where he apparently just forgot about them for months at a time. Ordinary life was too boring to distract him away from his depression. Danger and crucial details of equipment and planning were able to mask his despair with the result that his life was completely unbalanced in favor of mountain climbing, with the summit of Everest the goal. Yet when he getting ready to die on the mountain (and his wife, Peach, was planning to abandon him after a remarkable history of forbearance) it was, he says, a vision of his family which roused him to break free of the ice and stumble back to camp.

He is now retraining himself, almost recreating himself to pay attention to his family. Beck Weathers is telling a very straightforward story of redemption, in his case, a physical salvation which led to a change of heart; nevertheless, it is a complex and touching story, partly because Beck’s is not the only voice in the book. Peach has her say, his children speak, even the helicopter pilot who bravely plucked his ruined body off the mountain speaks, as do friends and climbing comrades.

I have read all the mountain climbing accounts I can find, seized by an enduring curiosity about the impulse which drives people, mostly men, to undergo miserable physical conditions, pain, and danger, to go up a mountain for reasons unfathomable to an uninitiated person. I have no desire to perch up there in the death zone without oxygen on an unstable ledge of rock and ice. Nevertheless, people do such things voluntarily and write books about the experience, which I read in hope of understanding.

The accounts tend to be stoic and emotionally shallow, full of unspoken male bonding issues and pride in endurance of pain. Beck Weathers' voice is different, more self-aware and even ironic. It is impossible to know whether his voice gained its resonance after the event; it is, after all, a book about profound failure to appreciate his family, even about failing to “conquer” Everest. The other books I’ve read were about managing to reach the summit in spite of obstacles; Beck Weathers' book is about managing to stay alive and learning to live a better life in spite of terrible, partially self-inflicted damage.

He did have a co-author and it is impossible to tell what Stephen G. Michaud contributed to the strong voice which rings through the pages of this book. The collaboration has worked, in this case, to produce a touching and thoughtful account of a man’s extreme experience of enlightment, and it is to their credit that they have written a book in which ‘adventure’ is not the most important element, but subordinate to emotional maturity and health.