Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit, the newest book by the famed mountaineer, is a conversation between Messner and interviewer Thomas H etlin, an award-winning German journalist. It reveals a more thoughtful and conversational Messner than one finds in his previous books, with the "talk" between Messner and H etlin covering not only the highlights of Messner's climbing career, but also his treks across Tibet, the Gobi, and Antarctica; his five-year-stint as a member of the European Parliament; his encounter with and study of the yeti; his thoughts on traditional male/female roles; and much more. Readers learn about Messner's childhood, his thoughts about eating ice cream with girls (against), politics (mostly liberal), and his technique for killing chickens (sharp scissors). Messner is known as one of history's greatest Himalayan mountaineers, a man who pushed back the frontiers of the possible for a whole generation of climbers. While the interest in My Life at the Limit is that