The Escapist: How One Man Cheated Death on the World's Highest Mountains. This item is unavailable.The Escapist: How One Man Cheated Death on the World's Highest Mountains

Survival comes at a price

In The Escapist, one of Canada’s foremost mountaineers, Gabriel Filippi, shares a life spent in and out of the Death Zone and proves an old axiom true: no climber returns from a summit the same person as when he began his ascent.

The Escapist is an unflinching account of extreme feats and devastating loss that takes you to six continents as Filippi dissects both what it takes to get to the top of the world, and what that quest takes out of you. Over the course of twenty years spent scaling the world’s highest peaks, Filippi has repeatedly cheated death. From a Taliban attack on a mountainside in northern Pakistan that felled ten of his climbing companions to the deadliest disaster in Everest’s history, Filippi has survived again and again.

A story about human perseverance and triumph in the pursuit of one man’s dreams, The Escapist helps to explain why some people will never give up on trying to climb to the top of the world.

Gabriel Filippi is one of Canada’s foremost mountaineers. The second Canadian and only Quebecer to climb both faces of Everest, he has scaled the highest peaks of six of the world’s continents. An ambassador for his hometown of Lac-Mégantic, Filippi is also an Ironman, a young grandfather and a seasoned public speaker. He lives in Montreal.

BRETT POPPLEWELL is a bestselling author and associate professor of journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Mother Jones, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Sportsnet, Maclean's and The Walrus, among other publications. A winner of multiple National Magazine Awards in Canada, his work has also appeared in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best Canadian Essays.