"Mountain Madness is an essay collection that covers the narrator's change from West Texas evangelical to mountain guide-addict to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, the author lived in Kosuge Village (population 900), nestled in central Japan's peaks. He was the only foreigner in this rugged, hilly town, and the book uses these three years as a frame. The project profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and the fallout from mountain obsession, including an essay on Craig Arnold, the poet who disappeared on a Japanese volcano. The collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities, physical and metaphysical?"-- Provided by publisher
