Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Aron Ralston

"Sylvain Tesson found a radical solution to his need for freedom, one as ancient as the hermits of old Russia: he decided to lock himself alone in a cabin in the middle taiga, on the shores of Lake Baykal, for six months. From February to July 2010, he lived in silence, solitude and cold. His cabin, built by Soviet geologists in the Brezhnev years, was a cube of logs three metres by three metres, heated by a cast iron skillet, a six-day walk from the nearest village. To live isolated from the world while retaining one's sanity requires a routine. In the morning, he would read, write, smoke or draw, and then devote hours to cutting wood, shovelling snow and fishing. Emotionally, these months proved a challenge, and the loneliness was crippling. Noting carefully, almost daily, his impressions of the silence, his struggles to survive in hostile nature, his despair, his doubts, but also moments of ecstasy, inner peace and harmony, and harmony with nature, [he] shares with us an extraordinary experience."--Jacket.