In 1988, Mimi Zie­man, the twen­ty-five-year-old daugh­ter of two Holo­caust sur­vivors, was in her third year of med­ical school, hun­ger­ing to feel alive. She jumped at the chance to sup­port four climbers as they attempt­ed a new route up the rarely tra­versed East Face of Ever­est with­out sher­pas or sup­ple­men­tal oxy­gen. She would be the only doc­tor, and the only woman, with them. Two of the climbers have writ­ten their own accounts of the ascent, but Zieman’s per­spec­tive is unique. Her Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, which gave her sta­mi­na to meet the phys­i­cal and men­tal dan­gers of the jour­ney, only grew stronger when cou­pled with Tibetan spirituality. 

When the book opens, no one knows what has hap­pened to three of the climbers who left Advanced Base Camp nine days before. The next 122 pages move back and forth through time. Zeiman recounts mem­o­ries from her child­hood, her col­lege years, and her solo trek around the Anna­pur­na Cir­cuit in 1986. In order to pre­pare for the ascent up Ever­est, she research­es the med­i­cine she will need to know. Halfway through the book, Zie­man thinks of the song ​“Dayenu,” thank­ful as her team gath­ers in Bei­jing. She thinks of it not because of the many mir­a­cles that ​“would have been enough,” but because of all the ran­dom events that have brought her to this moment: her father for­get­ting to fill out the finan­cial aid form for her favorite col­lege, which led her to McGill; see­ing the poster for the Rocky Moun­tain Bio­log­i­cal Lab­o­ra­to­ry, which awak­ened her love of being phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged out­doors and result­ed in her see­ing a slideshow about Tibet.

Walk­ing the fine line between excite­ment and dan­ger, Zie­man sought to forge her own path fol­low­ing a child­hood in which she felt both nur­tured and con­fined by her immi­grant par­ents. Her book opens with a quote from the Tibetan Bud­dhist nun Pema Chö­drön: ​“If we go to the places that scare us … we just might find the bound­less life we’ve always dreamed of.” Both forth­right and quirky in style, this page-turn­ing mem­oir cap­tures one woman’s search for that bound­less life.