With personal essays detailing noteworthy climbing sites throughout the western United States, infused with a few terrifying excursions to the Alps and a trip to the Bugaboos of western Canada, Warnings Against Myself opens up the beautiful, obsessive world of mountain climbing to climbers and non-climbers alike.

From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon’s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the Harding Icefield in the Kenai Mountains of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey, David Stevenson chronicles several decades of a life unified by a preoccupation with climbing.

Stevenson describes climbing first-hand, but also reflects on climbing in a beautiful way that draws in both literary references and engaging characterizations of well-known climbers. His changing viewpoint on his dangerous obsession as he ages, marries, and has children (and then takes his son climbing) give the book a strong shape, and the work as a whole adds a new and thoughtful perspective to the literature of climbing.

David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is the author of the short fiction collection Letters from Chamonix, winner of the Banff Mountain Festival Fiction Prize, and has published widely in journals such as Ascent, Alpinist, Isotope, and Weber Studies, as well as in The American Alpine Journal where he has been book review editor since 1996.

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