This edition is only available in Italian.

This is not your typical instruction manual, it is much more useful. It is a rich collection of all those little tricks that make the difference: at the crag, in the mountains or when planning your next expedition. It is a book for everyone already accustomed to the big walls, but also for those who only go to the mountains occasionally. These tips are based on thirty years of obsession with climbing, as well as nineteen ascents of El Cap, numerous north faces in the Alps, explorations of the polar ice caps and many other impressive expeditions and climbs.

Andy Kirkpatrick has a reputation for being someone who seeks out routes where the danger is real and what comes back to the climber is rather impalpable. He has ventured up some of the hardest walls and slopes in the Alps and beyond. He was born and raised on a working-class estate in Hull, one of the flattest places in England, and suffered from a severe form of dyslexia that was only diagnosed at nineteen. Andy has capitalized on this apparent adversity and has become one of the most successful and motivated mountaineers in the world, as well as an award-winning writer.
In 2001 he made a solo ascent of the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, one of the hardest solo climbs in the world. This experience was the central theme of his first work Psychovertical, winner of the 2008 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature and whose Italian edition (Psychovertical, Versante Sud, 2011) won the XXX edition of the Premio Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti in 2012. He won the Boardman Tasker Prize again in 2012 with his second work, Cold Wars (Italian edition Sulla linea del rischio, Versante Sud, 2014).
In 2014 he was a climbing partner for presenter Alex Jones on BBC One's The One Show, climbing the Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park, USA, in aid of the sport-related charity Sport Relief. Andy lives in Sheffield with his two sons.