Biographies & Memoirs, Biographies, Mountain Climbing, Shooting, Messner, Reinhold, 1944- Mountaineers -- Austria -- Biography, Mountaineers, Austria 

Reinhold Messner's climbing autobiography puts his whole career in perspective for the first time in one impressive volume. It spans the early Dolomite winter first ascents and solos that set the benchmarks for he 'sixties, moves on through his record making ascents of all fourteen 8000-metre peaks and his seven summits of the seven continents, to end reflectively with a turning away from the overcrowded Alps and eight-thousanders to find climbing fulfilment in the remoter parts of the world and in crossing the wastes of Antarctica.

He is known as one of history's greatest Himalayan mountaineers, a man who pushed back the frontiers of the possible for a whole generation of climbers. In his revealing autobiography, Reinhold Messner reflects on his remarkable career. His story is more than a recounting of "firsts." Here Messner reveals the forces and events that have shaped him as an individual and as a climber--including his brother's tragic death on Nanga Parbat in 1970.

Messner takes us from the days of his first climb of the Sass Rigais in the Dolomites with his father at age 5 to his later turning away from the overcrowded Alps and 8,000 meter-peaks to find fulfillment in the remoter parts of the world and in crossing the wastes of Antarctica. In between emerges the man as famous for his disciplined approach as for his innovative spirit.

Messner evolved his philosophy of the single free-climbing line with its uncompromising purity of style in the Dolomites and, as equipment and technique developed, he was in the forefront of the transference of fast lightweight alpine methods to the great ranges. "Reinhold Messner: Free Spirit" puts the career of a mountain pioneer in full perspective.