An inspiration
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Colin Fletcher captures the magnificence of the Grand Canyon with his self effacing prose. The simplicity of his style belies the power of the content, the pace becomes addictive. Not for those poor souls looking for a tour guide, more for those of us seeking harmony with the natural world.A masterpiece.
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The man who walked through time moved slower then a sloth!
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I am an avid backpacker as well as an avid book reader. I picked this book up after finding it on a reading list handed out by one of my perfesors. I expected an adventure full of zeal and corisma, but found only a mundan account of on man's attempt at bieng profound. Colin Fletcher uterly failed and should be banished. *Note to Colin Fletcher- Please Don't write any more BooKs!
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Seems forced
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Fletcher, supposedly the first man to walk the length of the Grand Canyon, below the Rim (seems unlikely), wrote a book about it. I must say I'm sorely disappointed in the result. It's horribly repetitive and boring, to begin with (he repeats his descriptions of how the Canyon formed again and again, for example). But my main objection is that Fletcher was determined before the trip began to have some sort of "break" with his old self, to become a new man, to have new heights of understanding. So every time he had some new impression of the Canyon, he would go on and on about how "now I had finally escaped the trivia of everyday life. Now at last I no longer needed to scrutinize the wildlife; I had become part of it," and so forth. And each time he would then begin to scrutinize the Canyon and have another grand Moment, and repeat himself about escaping the trivia again. All very tiresome; still there are some good scenes here, and his final chapter, consisting of his ruminations on Man, is pretty interesting. I just wish we had more of a memoir of what it was like to walk and live in the Canyon, not a diary of forced mystical epiphanies.
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A book as alluring as the Grand Canyon itself
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Colin Fletcher's THE MAN WHO WALKED THROUGH TIME is as alluring as the Grand Canyon itself. Why? It successfully fuses human spirit with rock, water, bush, and animal. We walk the Tonto plateau above the Colorado River with Mr. Fletcher and even beyond because our senses are stimulated to wonder, sometimes worry, about what's around the next bend. We feel the heat, we experience the spiney shaft of a cactus plant, we see the ravens soar above in desert skies, and we pray that we will make it to the next cache of supplies and cool water. For those of us seemingly locked into the corporate world of time, pressure, and demands for productive performance, this book provides necessary relief. And yet, there are different pressures, different times, and different demands for productive performance in the midst of that incredibly alluring Grand Canyon far below the world of the rim. Time is measured in penetrating silence. Pressure is felt on the feet and in the stomach. High performance is demanded in scaling a steep angle of loose and crumbling rock.
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