The Color of Everything by Cory Richards

“Wow! Wow! Just wow!” But this is no child’s goat-cow-giraffe-zebra-horse….

The Color of Everything is a memoir of adventure, success, fame, and the struggle to overcome personal demons. Cory Richards grew up in Utah's mountains, learning outdoor skills from his father despite a troubled home life. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he found solace in photography and climbing. His successful adventure photography career was disrupted by a catastrophic avalanche, forcing him to confront past trauma and mental health.

The Color of Everything is a demanding work. It’s a torrent. A purging. It’s a very fluid book, insofar as it’s like a large body of water. It swells, stretches out in a calm peace, crashes with floods, and slows to trickling streams. It’s raw…if I can use a word that Cory himself hides behind by hating it. Though I dislike the use of present tense in a broad sense, I can feel the pull of him through life as existing only in moments. He is constantly in the now, and this memoir delivers this. You can know Cory from these pages — maybe more or less than he intended, and maybe more or less than through his photography, but you can feel his presence throughout.

Inside this memoir, Cory emerges as adventurer, artist, and observer. There’s beauty in the writing style, whether his own or a ghost writer’s, and it’s a marbling of fact and experience. Yes, there’s a decent amount of mountain climbing, but there is also science, mostly centered around mental health explorations, and a deep poignancy that felt like an exposed wound. Some of it is science for you. Some are his plaintive pleas of defending and defining himself with science. But it doesn’t matter, it all works together as if he’s both teacher and patient. He has split himself open down the middle and said look here.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.