Before Georgetown physics professor Francis Slakey decided to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean, he had shut himself off from other people. His lectures were mechanical; his relationships were little more than ways to fill the evenings. But as his journey veered dangerously off course, everything about him began to change.
A gripping adventure of the body and mind, To the Last Breath depicts the quest that leads Slakey around the globe, almost takes his life, challenges his fiercely held beliefs, and opens his heart. The scientist in Slakey explores the history of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctica expedition, the technology of climbing, and the geophysics of waves. But it is the challenges he endures and the people he encounters—a Lama who gives him a mysterious amulet, a life-or-death choice atop Everest, an ambush at gunpoint in Indonesia, a head-on collision in the high desert—that culminate in a moving lesson about what it means to be human.
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“To The Last Breath is, in a word, breathtaking. Dr. Slakey takes
you with him as he blasts through blizzards and dangles by frayed lines to get
to the top of the highest mountains. He also adds the science of surfing to
your body of knowledge. I felt his transformation as if it were my own: from
restrained physics professor who gives his students equations instead of
himself, to humane, caring soul, willing to love and to lose and to truly enter
the world. Slakey’s story has the adrenaline of high adventure, but more
importantly, it delivers the thrill of self-discovery.”
—
Lucinda Franks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of My Father’s Secret War