What do you think?
Rate this book
Hanging by a Thread: The Missions of a Helicopter Rescue Doctor
Outdoor sports enthusiast and extreme doctor Emmanuel Cauchy reveals here for the first time the perilous rescues he’s performed in the world’s most terrifying and unforgiving mountain climates. Known around the world as the “vertical doctor,” Emmanuel Cauchy gives stunning and terrifying accounts of his days as a rescue doctor on Mont Blanc, which rises more than 11,000 feet in the Alps along the French-Italian border. From snowy mountain peaks and deep mountain crevasses to the small confines of a helicopter high above—Cauchy’s job takes him where most of us can only imagine.
Using new scientific research pioneered on the mountainside in life-saving medical procedures, Cauchy’s dramatic mountain rescues will leave even the most seasoned reader, doctor, or outdoorsman astonished. Here are seventeen years spent in the air and on the ground in some of the world’s most unforgiving territory. His tales describe the extremes of both climate and human endurance and reverberate with the author’s unshakable love of life.
This is an uplifting, extraordinary, and moving book from a great humanitarian stuntman who spent his time literally living life on the edge.
Using new scientific research pioneered on the mountainside in life-saving medical procedures, Cauchy’s dramatic mountain rescues will leave even the most seasoned reader, doctor, or outdoorsman astonished. Here are seventeen years spent in the air and on the ground in some of the world’s most unforgiving territory. His tales describe the extremes of both climate and human endurance and reverberate with the author’s unshakable love of life.
This is an uplifting, extraordinary, and moving book from a great humanitarian stuntman who spent his time literally living life on the edge.
- GenresAutobiography
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 26, 2009
6 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 14, 2022
Mm. I love me a good wilderness-rescue story, so I was very pleased to find this, even with the mediocre reviews. But...it's not the most cohesive wilderness-rescue story I've read, to the extent that I found large swathes of it very difficult to follow.
This comes down to a couple of things, I think. First, although I have—for a layperson—a good understanding of mountain rescue and of medicine (let me emphasise, again, for a layperson!), I have a very limited understanding of mountaineering, particularly the kind that requires ice axes and ice screws and crampons. Though this book is as far as I can tell meant for a lay audience, I think the ideal reader has already done his or her share of mountaineering and can visualise what's going on—I very rarely could. Truly, all I can visualise having finished the book is that I have no interest in this kind of mountaineering.
Second, Cauchy has a tendency to go on a tangent: to introduce one rescue and then say 'this reminded me of this other rescue...' and fly off to tell that other rescue story, and maybe another anecdote or two, first. In a lot of books that's fine—it's great for introducing a bit of suspense, having stronger through-threads, et cetera. But I often found myself back in the second part of one of those stories no longer certain who the players were or what was going on, and I think a big part of that is that many of the stories are, at their core, similar: ice and crevasses and dangerous falls. It makes it harder, when you don't have the mountaineering background, to work out which story is which.
The structure of both anecdotes and overall book ended up feeling very chaotic, with characters sometimes left—literally—hanging. Fairly early on, for example, there's a story of two climbers slogging up a mountain. They're overtaken by a guy who ends up in a precarious position; a helicopter is called in to help that guy; in the process of trying to extract him, he falls and knocks the original two climbers off their perches. They're left dangling from an ice screw while the helicopter zooms off to see if the third guy is dead. Until this point, the story has focused heavily on these two hikers, but when the helicopter zooms off for the third guy, they're forgotten—after all, I guess, he's the one who's bleeding. It's not until the end of the chapter that we know that . I don't know anything about ice screws—how long they take to place, how much effort it takes to do so, how much weight they can hold and for how long. I don't know how big they are or how deep into the ice they need to go. I don't know how to get back to the mountain face if you're dangling in midair from an ice screw. This is all stuff that Cauchy knows, but I guess it didn't occur to him that the lay reader might need a bit more information.
The book might be a translation of Docteur Vertical (I haven't been able to confirm), in which case translation issues might contribute. Hard to tell.
Cauchy died in 2018—in the mountains, in an avalanche. Terrible, but also as fitting a death as this book could predict.
This comes down to a couple of things, I think. First, although I have—for a layperson—a good understanding of mountain rescue and of medicine (let me emphasise, again, for a layperson!), I have a very limited understanding of mountaineering, particularly the kind that requires ice axes and ice screws and crampons. Though this book is as far as I can tell meant for a lay audience, I think the ideal reader has already done his or her share of mountaineering and can visualise what's going on—I very rarely could. Truly, all I can visualise having finished the book is that I have no interest in this kind of mountaineering.
Second, Cauchy has a tendency to go on a tangent: to introduce one rescue and then say 'this reminded me of this other rescue...' and fly off to tell that other rescue story, and maybe another anecdote or two, first. In a lot of books that's fine—it's great for introducing a bit of suspense, having stronger through-threads, et cetera. But I often found myself back in the second part of one of those stories no longer certain who the players were or what was going on, and I think a big part of that is that many of the stories are, at their core, similar: ice and crevasses and dangerous falls. It makes it harder, when you don't have the mountaineering background, to work out which story is which.
The structure of both anecdotes and overall book ended up feeling very chaotic, with characters sometimes left—literally—hanging. Fairly early on, for example, there's a story of two climbers slogging up a mountain. They're overtaken by a guy who ends up in a precarious position; a helicopter is called in to help that guy; in the process of trying to extract him, he falls and knocks the original two climbers off their perches. They're left dangling from an ice screw while the helicopter zooms off to see if the third guy is dead. Until this point, the story has focused heavily on these two hikers, but when the helicopter zooms off for the third guy, they're forgotten—after all, I guess, he's the one who's bleeding. It's not until the end of the chapter that we know that . I don't know anything about ice screws—how long they take to place, how much effort it takes to do so, how much weight they can hold and for how long. I don't know how big they are or how deep into the ice they need to go. I don't know how to get back to the mountain face if you're dangling in midair from an ice screw. This is all stuff that Cauchy knows, but I guess it didn't occur to him that the lay reader might need a bit more information.
The book might be a translation of Docteur Vertical (I haven't been able to confirm), in which case translation issues might contribute. Hard to tell.
Cauchy died in 2018—in the mountains, in an avalanche. Terrible, but also as fitting a death as this book could predict.
June 28, 2009
I had to give up on it.
It wasn't bad, but... I should've been duly forewarned by the "doctor" in the title. Frostbite, broken limbs, gore... I wouldn't have minded any of those. But noooo... instead he took great delight in discussing, IN DETAIL, issues about which I am strongly phobic. (That would be needles, and I don't mean knitting.)
The book was not without flaws. (Dammit, Jim, he's a doctor, not a writer.) The translation wasn't the greatest, at least not for an American audience. Several times I had the feeling a French idiom was being translated directly, which sort of fell flat in English. English idioms were likewise awkwardly used, at times. Measurements were kept in metric, which... okay, yeah, but it's disruptive for me to have to pull out a calculator, and the numbers are meaningless to me otherwise. (Hey, even a key would've helped.) A map would have been a major plus, as the distance from Point A to Mont B was often critical to the narrative, and there were a LOT of place names thrown out there at readers who likely would not have the author's intimate familiarity with the Alps. Overall, it lacks cohesion; the narrative is episodic, which is to be expected for a book of this nature, but it also jumps around chronologically. Some stories start to get you invested in the people involved in the crisis, but then abruptly switch to someone else's point of view, making the reader wonder why it started with the other people at all. Even without the, ahem, medical descriptions, this would've gotten two stars from me at best. What he does is REALLY amazing work, but he should stick to his day job.
It wasn't bad, but... I should've been duly forewarned by the "doctor" in the title. Frostbite, broken limbs, gore... I wouldn't have minded any of those. But noooo... instead he took great delight in discussing, IN DETAIL, issues about which I am strongly phobic. (That would be needles, and I don't mean knitting.)
The book was not without flaws. (Dammit, Jim, he's a doctor, not a writer.) The translation wasn't the greatest, at least not for an American audience. Several times I had the feeling a French idiom was being translated directly, which sort of fell flat in English. English idioms were likewise awkwardly used, at times. Measurements were kept in metric, which... okay, yeah, but it's disruptive for me to have to pull out a calculator, and the numbers are meaningless to me otherwise. (Hey, even a key would've helped.) A map would have been a major plus, as the distance from Point A to Mont B was often critical to the narrative, and there were a LOT of place names thrown out there at readers who likely would not have the author's intimate familiarity with the Alps. Overall, it lacks cohesion; the narrative is episodic, which is to be expected for a book of this nature, but it also jumps around chronologically. Some stories start to get you invested in the people involved in the crisis, but then abruptly switch to someone else's point of view, making the reader wonder why it started with the other people at all. Even without the, ahem, medical descriptions, this would've gotten two stars from me at best. What he does is REALLY amazing work, but he should stick to his day job.
February 25, 2015
Dr. Emmanuel Cauchy writes about the harrowing rescues he's performed for over seventeen years as a helicopter "rescue doctor" in the Alps. Although the translation is awkward at times, Cauchy's accounts provide the reader with a thrilling and interesting view of medicine. This book would appeal to climbers and people who like true medical thrillers.
December 7, 2009
Picked up at Layton Library. Interesting on resucing on the mountains. But he had some swear words and language that he could have left out.
October 27, 2011
I enjoyed this, although I wonder how interesting it would be for people who don't know much about mountaineering. As it was, I just barely understood most of what was going on...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews