On Heights & Hunger

A memoir of two professional and competitive tree-climbing brothers, both hungry for transcendence and adventure, coming to terms with their relationship to the divine, the family that first provided a framework for faith, and their own obsessions, victories, and failures."Written with a passion that burns into the page, Josh MacIvor-Andersen straps the pieces of his own story to his back and takes us up into the canopy above, into a 'tree hunger' where he shaves and prunes and cuts until he arrives at the many shimmering truths of this beautifully told profession of love: for his brother, for physical labor, for the earth we have abused, for the search for God, for beauty, for the right woman, for the way to live this one life we are all given. This is one of the finest memoirs I've read in quite a while." - Andre Dubus III"On Heights & Hunger is the most gripping, insightful, fire-bright memoir I've read in a very long time. It uses as its springboard the complex love between two brothers, then deftly vaults into a wide-ranging exploration of seemingly disparate subjects: competitive tree-climbing, Christian faith, the travails of youth and discovering purpose in life, and so much more. The narrative that emerges is both emotionally and intellectually engaging at the highest level. I loved it." - Jeremy Hawkins, author of The Last Days of Video"Here is a new version of the old story where the promise of old made miraculously new falls short, and it's left to the teller to make a different tale. Josh MacIvor-Andersen is a fine teller." - Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk"Josh MacIvor-Andersen's debut memoir On Heights and Hunger somehow feels like an ancient tale, a myth of family and faith and trees that has been retold for a modern audience. There is wrestling in these pages--honest and painful wrestling with demons and doubt, and it is this essayistic reckoning through story that pulls me in and keeps me watching, almost hypnotized, as he dances through time and place with the same grace and skill with which Andersen and his brother danced through the trees of Nashville." - Steven Church, author of One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters between Man and Animal and a founding editor of The Normal School"With a storyteller's heart and a poet's sensibility, Josh MacIvor-Andersen uncovers everything dangerous and divine in the Tennessee treetops. He lures readers higher and higher, with staggering, perfectly chiseled sentences, before whisking us off to Moscow and Oaxaca and beyond, always in search of something other-worldly. I went along gladly, gratefully-gobbling up each new lyrical line and unexpected connection-before coming back down to earth, feeling changed. Not to mention smarter." - Jeremy B. Jones, author of Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland"I met the human gods of MacIvor-Andersen's gorgeous and big-hearted memoir once before, in William Blake's giants of inner conflict that everyone must embrace to be whole. In On Heights & Hunger, it's as though you'd stepped into the pages of Joseph Campbell's journeys, where the wounded hero is brother Aaron, maniacal in the trees, fearless and 'almost dying all the time.' There's a mighty lot of chainsaws and testosterone in this tale of purely male energy in youth-and then, surprise, it ripens into deep tenderness for all sentient beings. Truly half out of their minds when young, Aaron and Josh grow into men of compassion and ineffable sweetness. Yet nothing's predictable here, so the trajectory isn't just toward a pilgrim's progress-for a journey dedicated to the life-force, it remains a piercing rumination on mortality, a death-trip looking back from beyond the vale." - Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America