In reading about his adventure, you gain insight into not only the heart of a true adventurist trying to step foot where few have ever been and the hardships involved in such undertakings. You'll certainly think twice about sponsorship of your next adventure, especially any video documentation after hearing of his conflicts with his camera crew. At the same time, you'll gain a love of the people and land of Borneo. This tale is perfect for those who love adventure as well as learning the history of a people and their land.

By combining two stories, Lightner displays the hardships encountered by any outsider trying to achieve goals in harsh, inaccesable Borneo. Lightner's inclusion of Major Tom Harrison during WWII adds depth to the story and his admiration of the major comes through as well as his conflict with the photographers who urge Lightner to take more climbing risks than he knows are prudent.

I hope to see more books by the talented rock climber who is also an excellent writer.

Nevertheless, the dual stories make the book. Lightner correctly realizes that his own climbing tale is simply too thin. His other main problem is that the World War II story is far more interesting, especially since most people have no clue about how the war was fought on Borneo. (My own reference library on World War II devotes two sentences to the island: the Japanese captured it; later the Allies took it back.) Lightner has done a wonderful job of bringing this little-known story to life, but by so doing, he emphasizes the thinness of his own tale, whose central conflict turns out to be between himself and the film crew who helped finance the expedition. The "video guys," as he calls them, want things in exchange for their money that change the nature of the climbers' goals. That's interesting...but not as much so as a world war.

The third problem is that in his efforts to bring the story to life, Lightner's gone farther than needed, by fabricating dialog, characters' reactions to each other, and additional perceptual material to fill in gaps in the narrative. He admits this, but it's an ill-considered approach to a story with drama enough to stand on its own if he'd made it clear which material is based on someone's memoirs, and which is interpolated. Not doing it in the traditional manner leaves the reader wondering how much of the story is real, and how much is guesswork. Worse, it casts doubt on Lightner's own tale. Every time he intercuts from the present to the past, he does so by having himself reflect on the World War II story. The third time he did this, I wondered: Is this also a device? Might he have been napping at the time, rather than thinking about World War II? And if so, what else in the tale is a device?

None of this destroys the versimilitude of the whole, but it does undermine it. But that said, it's a good book, recommended to those with an interest in adventure travel, history, and to a lesser extent, climbing.