Ralston manages to keep the tension flowing throughout...alternating each chapter of angst-ridden, present-tense narrative with a cosier chapter of climbing nostalgia. This lends the book a Hitchcockian rhythm, see-sawing neatly between calm and tension... He is somehow able to chronicle the ebb and flow of his thoughts and feelings during his ordeal with an exactness that gives his book the emotional pull of a psychological thriller.

Aron Ralston, an experienced twenty-seven-year-old outdoorsman, was on a day’s solitary hike through a remote and narrow Utah canyon when he dislodged an eight-hundred- pound boulder that crushed his right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Emerging from the searing pain, Aron found himself completely stuck. No one knew where he was; no one was coming to rescue him. With scant water and food, and a cheap pocketknife his only tool, he eliminated his options one by one. On the fifth night, wracked by delirium and uncontrollable shivers, Aron scratched his epitaph into the rock wall, certain he would not see daylight.

Yet with the new morning came an epiphany: if he could use the rock’s vise-like hold to break his arm bones, his blunted pocketknife could serve as a surgeon’s blade...