Author Clinton Crockett Peters details his travels and personal transformation in Mountain Madness. He goes from an evangelical Christian in West Texas to a mountain guide addict to a humbled humanist following a near-fatal accident in the Chichibu Mountains of Japan.
In the span of three years, from 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village nestled in central Japan’s peaks. The village had a population of 900, and he was the only foreigner. He cleverly uses these three years as a frame for this essay collection, which profiles who he was before his travels, why he became consumed with mountains and his fallout from that obsession.
At the end of the day, this collection of essays poses the question, how can landscape produce and end identities?
