No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks by Ed Viesturs |
Dark Summit: The Extraordinary True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil |
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A death-haunted saga of the scalers of heaven.Mountaineering was, for many decades, a particularly British enterprise. To judge by the young men whom alpinist Chris Bonington recruited to climb with him in the 1950s and beyond, it was a British enterprise because its practitioners did all they could to escape "the villages, slums, and middle-class suburbs of post-war Great Britain." Free spirits all, these climbers proved themselves on the Alps, scaling pitches of the Eiger and Mont Blanc that no one had scaled before, fearlessly riding the "Wall of Death." Such testing done, "Bonington's Boys" were ready for the Himalayas, when that wall became a most real thing; on their 1970 ascent of Annapurna, looking for all the world more "like a traveling rock band-the Beatles on their way to visit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-than a traditional British mountaineering expedition," Bonington and company lost one of their best mates. Death would become a constant companion, and the roll of those whom outdoor sportswriter and anthologist Willis (Adrenaline 2000, 2001, etc.) rightly considers to be the greatest climbing generation in history was severely thinned by weather, accident and misjudgment. Bonington himself was a capable leader, though it was not until he was 50 that he himself made the summit of Everest, guided along by ghosts. Willis gives in at times to the temptation to throw a few Monday-morning passes, but for the most part, he offers a faithful version of events as they are known to have occurred. A notable exception is the haunting close, when climber Peter Boardman, high atop Everest, awaits death, worrying that his friends would find him there, "skin dried and drawn up on his bones, hair gone white." As indeed they did.This lacks some of the thrills and spills of Into Thin Air but is of the same class and caliber-and will make many readers wonder why anyone would ever dare climb into the clouds. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
"The Boys of Everest" tells the story of a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest's first ascent. It is a story of tremendous courage, astonishing achievement and heart- breaking loss. Their leader was the boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington. His inner circle - they came to be known as Bonington's Boys - included a dozen who became climbing's greatest generation. Bonington's Boys gave birth to a new brand of climbing. They took increasingly terrible risks on now -legendary expeditions to the world's most fearsome peaks. And they paid an enormous price for their achievements. Most of Bonington's boys died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: was it worth it? "The Boys Of Everest", based on interviews with surviving climbers and other individuals as well as five decades of journals, expedition accounts, and letters, provides the closest thing to an answer that we'll ever have. It offers riveting descriptions of what the boys of Everest found in the mountains - as well as an understanding of what they lost there.
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77% buy the item featured on this page: The Boys of Everest: The Tragic Story of Climbing's Greatest Generation |
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7% buy Into Thin Air: Personal Account of the Everest Disaster £5.37 |
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7% buy Dark Summit: The Extraordinary True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season £5.97 |
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5% buy The Mammoth Book of on the Edge £5.98 |
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