Jean Muenchrath, If I Live Until Morning *** 1/2

The aspect I find most interesting in mountaineering stories is the psychology of the adventurer. The hook for these books is the remote locales and the joys/risks of testing our limits, but the narrator's personality is often more exotic than the expedition.

If I Live Until Morning doesn't start out as the same kind of book as, say, Beyond the Mountain. Jean Muenchrath's adventures are on a scale more relatable to us non-professionals. Skiing the John Muir Trail from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney is ambitious for sure, but it's not soloing Half Dome. The title and the back cover synopsis promise a story of resilience and personal transformation.

The first third of the book describes the ski trip in quite a bit of detail. The writing is serviceable but flat, as if Muenchrath took a community college course in writing non-fiction and applied the grammar lessons to the contents of her journal. I got whiplash from her sentence-by-sentence polarity switch between positive and negative sentiments:

The climb out of town and up to Duck Pass was fast and easy. Avalanche debris was the only thing that slowed us down. It was tiresome and time-consuming to navigate through a labyrinth of broken trees and chunks of snow.

We heard a whoosh sound as the poles quickly disappeared down the hill. A few moments of panic followed. Which way did the poles go? How far had they traveled? Would we ever find them in the dense forest below and in the fading light? After a long search we located the missing tent poles. Later we went to bed pleased with our progress: we had skied seventeen miles that day and crossed two high mountain passes.

Muenchrath suffers a life-threatening fall near the end of the trip. Her partner Ken behaves valiantly during the ordeal but weirdly distant afterward. She marries him anyway, even though he orders her not to talk about the incident, forces her into climbing with him (because he can't find other partners), and berates her for her physical limitations. "Our love for mountains kept us together"!

At this point in the story, I became entirely focused on the puzzle of Muenchrath's personality. She narrates her treks in the Himalayas with her trademark hot-and-cold details (sublime mountains alongside piles of human excrement) but I analyzed her relationships with traveling partners and eventually clients when she becomes a mountain travel guide. It culminates in a chapter where Ken announces "out of the blue" that their marriage is over and Muenchrath passive-aggressively cares for her sister who is dying from ALS. Funny-sad highlights:

Debby and I sought the nourishment of nature. I often took her to Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. During the winter it was nearly impossible to get her to the view point a few hundred yards from the parking lot. With the walker in front of her, I leaned against her back and pushed her across the packed snow.

She needed assistance with everything... My back hurt from the effort, but I kept this to myself so she wouldn't feel guilty.

Whatever this attitude is, it ain't the Buddhist one she attempts to cultivate in the final chapters of the book.

I've said before that I enjoy books with unreliable narrators, which require you to interpret how the real story differs from the warped version you're being told. I wasn't expecting that from If I Live Until Morning, but it's sorta what I got.

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America ***

Desmond's previous book, Evicted, looked at a pervasive social issue (the lack of affordable housing) through specific stories about entire communities. This book tackles the more general issue of poverty in a more journalistic way, with studies and statistics. Both of them ask the question "What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people, including ourselves?"

Poverty, by America reminded me of a series on income inequality I read many years ago on Slate: looking at various possible explanations for poverty and debunking them with data. Desmond concisely summarizes the ways that we exploit the poor, in employment, housing, education, financial resources, and argues that none of these situations are inevitable. He demonstrates how rich Americans receive more government assistance than poor Americans, with the assistance to rich Americans less visible (due to tax breaks for example) so that we can pretend it doesn't exist.

Frankly, I didn't learn anything new from Poverty, by America. I'm fairly well read on the subjects of housing, gentrification, and the economies of poor neighborhoods, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has provided similar summaries of, for example, payday loans. I was disappointed with the conventional nature of Desmond's suggested remedies. After clearly showing the insidious and intertwined nature of the problem, he recommends the standard progressive response to individual areas (raise the minimum wage, encourage unionization, change zoning laws, regulate cash checking services). The specific examples of exploitation all flow from a comprehensive American worldview, so I wanted a more comprehensive proposed solution.

One major point he does make is that we could enact the necessary changes without increasing the federal budget, by redirecting assistance from rich folks to poor folks.