One Man's Mountains

By Tom Patey

Book Overview

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life--with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy--despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives "add up to something." Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory--with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary--is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0575013583
• ISBN13: 9780575013582
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Gollancz
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great hilarious book on true mountaineering.

Tom is both a gifted climber and writer. If you like arm chair mountaineering books, and have read "the White spider" or any of the other North face of the Eiger climbing books you'll really love his take on that climb. Plus his climbers dictionary is just great. I second this opinion, buy this book!

Outstanding!

Tom Patey not only climbed some wicked routes, but was an incredibly gifted and humorous writer, often in a self effacing manner. This is one of the best climbing books I have ever read. Three words: Buy this book!