Take the Lead: Hanging On, Letting Go, and Conquering Life’s Hardest Climbs

DiGiulian debuts with a gripping memoir about how she became a professional rock climber. She discovered her love for the sport at age seven while attending her older brother’s birthday party at a climbing gym in her hometown of Alexandria, Va., where later that year she started training with a team to climb competitively. Her teenage years were spent practicing on weekdays and competing on weekends, hard work that paid off when at age 19 DiGiulian won gold in the Female Overall category at the 2011 International Federation of Sport Climbing World Championships. She continued to compete while studying at Columbia University, and though the death of her father from a stroke when she was 22 hit her hard, she worked through her grief by recommitting herself to climbing. The recreations of what it’s like to cling to cliffsides will have readers’ palms sweating (“The coarse sandpaper rock has shaved my fingertips bloody.... I maneuver my hips ever so slightly to the left in order to position my center of gravity above my left toe, which is balanced on a pebble-sized protrusion”), and her reflections on the sport are uplifting: “The challenge in life is to understand the difference between rational and irrational fear—to harness one and conquer the other.” This thrills and inspires. (Sept.)