[Alongside the painstaking moments in the crevice are richly told tales of Ralston's prior adventures. After quitting his job as a mechanical engineer, he became an expert outdoorsman. The book finds him trekking along mountaintops, precipices and canyon floors around the world. Here, a bear stalks him; there, an avalanche buries him. He is always close to falling, being crushed or losing one appendage or another. The flashbacks provide relief from the intense pinned-arm drama, but also put Ralston's doomed Utah trip in perspective:] I wanted to show that I wasn't in over my head, ... This was something that was relatively low-exposure for me.
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