Mr Quarter-to-Two: Life and Death with Mother Nature’s Misfits explores, through character sketches, the eccentric personalities of several unique individuals that indulge in a variety of extreme pursuits—mostly outdoor adventure sports such as rock climbing, mountaineering and over-the-edge whitewater boating. In a striking parallel the book also traces a similarity between traditional adventuring and a young man’s fascination with eco-terrorism. The focus is not just what was accomplished by these individuals, but what drove them to "put it on the line” and step out of the normal routine of life.
The book’s underlying theme is ultimate human values. Adventurers play with the fine line between Life and Death. In making the choices that define this line, they call upon intensely personal aesthetic values that are then given the ultimate testing. Both authors were protagonists in their stories and while it may seem that their extreme experiences isolate them, their sharing here has the flavor of universal humanistic values.
The essays are not all philosophical navel-gazing; on the contrary, they are laced with humor, pathos, drama, old-fashioned, compelling story-telling and unimaginable adventure, fully illustrated with 70 photographs. Though technically an anthology, the essays cohere to a larger whole—a story of how we can step outside ourselves and find a fascinating, transcendent, world.
