Quick Take
- Performance: Gina Rogers speaks for a first-person memoir whose author is not the reader, and no response here weighs in either way.
- What it covers: Seven Summits, ski mountaineering, a private ambition, expedition teamwork
- Feel: Thin-aired and driven
- Our call: A remarkable two-year quest told in a personal register, with the prose itself the one genuine point of dispute.
Seven summits in two years, climbed and then skied from the top, finished in 2006 by the first person ever to do it. Kit DesLauriers wrote Higher Love about those two years, and the audiobook runs just under eleven hours with Gina Rogers reading. The detail that turns this from a logbook into a story sits in the description, which says the quest began as a private ambition she kept to herself. Anyone who has attempted something large and told nobody in case it failed will recognize the shape of that immediately, and it is the thread the book hangs everything else on.
Is Higher Love Worth Your Time?
Kit DesLauriers had to do two things on each mountain, and the second one is what makes the achievement strange. Climbing the highest peak on a continent is a known undertaking with an established route and an established support structure. Skiing back down from the summit is a different sport with different failure modes, performed at the end of the day you are most exhausted and least able to absorb a mistake. Doing it seven times in twenty-four months, across every climate the planet offers, means the logistics alone would fill a book. The description promises a thrilling crescendo, and the structure of the quest supplies one whether or not the prose does.
Tantor Media released the recording on April 13, 2021, with 4.8 sitting above 107 ratings, which is a strong score across a real sample rather than a handful of votes. Worth registering, though: this is a first-person memoir performed by someone other than the woman who lived it. That is standard practice and often the right call, since climbing memoirs are not usually written by trained readers. It does change the relationship slightly. You are hearing an account of somebody's worst night in a tent delivered by a professional, and how much that matters to you is worth deciding before you buy.
The Best Parts of Higher Love
Antarctica's cold, an African rainforest, corn snow in Australia, blue ice on Everest: the copy lists the conditions, and the variety is the book's structural gift. Seven continents in two years means seven different problems, seven sets of local complications and seven separate arrivals in places where nobody is expecting a skier. Adventure memoirs that stay on one mountain have to generate variation from character and weather. This one gets it from the map, which keeps the middle stretch moving, and it means the book works in chunks: a listener can take a continent at a time without losing the arc.
Teamwork gets more attention here than the solo-hero framing usually allows, and a November 2024 five-star singles that out. Writing from a life spent in the Sierra Nevada around Lake Tahoe, that entry describes recognizing its own appetite for mountain country in DesLauriers, praising how vividly the people who made each climb possible are drawn, and noting how carefully the cultural differences between continents are handled. Bringing the supporting cast to life is the hardest thing in this genre, since the expedition members are usually reduced to names attached to jobs, and it is the difference between a record of an accomplishment and a story worth eleven hours.
Before You Commit to Higher Love
Writing quality is where this column genuinely splits, and the disagreement is worth taking seriously before you commit. A September 2017 four-star says plainly that the writing is not the best while calling the stories interesting and the quest challenging. A September 2022 five-star, filed by someone who has read a great many climbing books, calls it one of the better first-person accounts out there and specifically praises the writing and the editing. Both cannot be right, and prose is the quality that changes most when someone else reads it aloud, since a professional reader smooths flat sentences and can also expose padding.
Nobody in this column mentions Gina Rogers at all. Every response is discussing the book as a book, and one of them, a January 2017 five-star, is partly about the physical object, describing a copy received as a gift, arriving on schedule in good condition, and then being bought again as a gift for somebody else. That is a useful signal about the book's giftability and no signal at all about the recording. For a memoir where your entire experience arrives through one voice for eleven hours, going in without a single listener report on that voice is the real gap on this record.
Should You Listen to Higher Love?
Climbers and backcountry skiers are the obvious audience, particularly anyone who has looked at a summit ridge and thought about the descent rather than the top. Beyond that core, the book suits listeners who like goal-driven memoirs where the goal is genuinely difficult and the deadline is self-imposed. A December 2022 five-star describes looking forward to it every day, which is the most honest recommendation a long memoir can receive. If mountain writing appeals to you but expedition jargon usually defeats you, the two-year structure and the continental variety make this an easier entry than most siege-climbing accounts.
Mountaineering purists after technical detail should know the framing is personal rather than analytical: expect inspiration, teamwork and self-knowledge as organizing ideas rather than route beta and gear lists. Anyone allergic to the language of hero's journeys will find the description using exactly that vocabulary, though the underlying events are concrete enough to survive it. And if the quality of the sentence-by-sentence writing is what decides a memoir for you, the split verdict above is the thing to weigh, because one experienced reader here thinks the prose is the weakest part of a remarkable story.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Higher Love audiobook only about mountaineering?
No. The description frames the Seven Summits quest as the spine of a personal memoir, promising life-threatening consequences alongside personal insight, and it explicitly extends the theme past the mountains. Expect roughly as much attention to motivation, partnership and self-knowledge as to altitude and snow conditions.
Does the audiobook cover the descents as well as the climbs?
Very much so, and that is the distinguishing feature. The copy promises that DesLauriers leads you up each mountain and gives you a heart-racing ride back down, which is the whole point of the record she set. The skiing is the achievement, not a postscript to the climbing.
How much altitude jargon should a general listener expect?
Less than a technical expedition account. The copy's vocabulary runs to corn snow, blue ice and continental conditions rather than route grades and gear specifications, and the framing throughout stays narrative rather than instructional. Some terminology is unavoidable in the Everest chapters.
Is Higher Love suitable for listeners who do not ski?
Yes. The organizing ideas the description names are inspiration, teamwork and honoring your true nature, applied on and off the mountain, so the sport functions as the setting for a story about pursuing something difficult in private. Skiing knowledge adds texture but is not required to follow it.
