The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation [Hardcover]

Clint Willis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2006

This book 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 — which came to be know 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 Bonington's Boys found in the mountains, as well as an understanding of what they lost there.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With nowhere to go but down after the 1953 conquest of Mt. Everest, mountain climbing was reinvigorated by the group of young British daredevils celebrated in this gripping adventure saga. Journalist and mountain-climber Willis (Epic) profiles elder statesman Bonington and such climbing legends as the truculent working-class prodigy Don Whillan, the austere ex-seminarian Joe Tasker and the perpetually brooding Dougal Haston, "a beatnik's idea of a Romance poet." Their ethos of anti-establishment authenticity drove them to extreme climbs in which smaller teams working with minimal gear tackled harder routes under riskier conditions. Willis narrates almost step-by-step retracings of their ascents; they dodge falling rocks, freeze and hallucinate, dangle from fraying ropes and slip heart-stoppingly into crevasses. (Some of this detail, like the reconstructions of the last thoughts of men who died on the mountain, must be imagined rather than factual.) Less compelling are the many poetic evocations of the existential mystery of climbing—"a pilgrimage, an act of faith that arose from a sense of their own emptiness"—which add little to the standard "Because it's there." Fortunately, the spiritual musings don't obscure the bracing immediacy of Willis's story of life spent teetering on the edge of the abyss. Photos. (Oct. 1)
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Review

"A death-haunted saga of the scalers of heaven...the same class and caliber (as) Into Thin Air." -- Kirkus Reviews

"A dramatic and romantic look at the greatest generation of climbers." -- Library Journal

"Riveting, detailed, and full of insight . . . a refreshingly honest perspective on the tragic, selfish nature of our sport." -- Climbing magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 536 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; 1ST edition (August 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786715790
• ISBN-13: 978-0786715794
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > History > Asia > Nepal

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good read with some major flaws, March 18, 2007

By 

Constant Reader (Gloucester MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation (Hardcover)

There are a lot of great things about this book: it's certainly well-written, it deals with loss and with death as well as with the motives that draw climbers to these mountains, and it intersperses the fascinating history of postwar British climbing with gripping descriptions of the actual climbs. It suffers from two flaws, tho', one small, one big. The small is that it has no maps; unless you're familiar with these mountains, you're left guessing ascent routes (these matter a great deal, since a large part of what Bonington's generation did was pioneer new routes up classic mountains). The larger problem, as the Publishers Weekly points out, is that it's written very internally; we get a lot of inside-the-climber's-head and especially what-they-are-thinking-as-they-die moments that are based on... what? The acknowledgments thank Bonington for giving the author two mornings; this book is not based much on firsthand interviews etc., so how could Willis have this information? Since all of the internal dialogue/deaththoughts sound exactly the same, it's a fair bet that they're Willis' projections-- but he's a journalist, and while a fair climber, certainly not even close to being a member of the group he so fervently chronicles. In the end, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that I was reading Willis' own projections of his motives and thoughts of climbing onto a group of men very different from him, and in their most vulnerable moments-- as they climbed, and as they died. Like Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a book that tells a great mountain story, but in the end is far too much about the author, in a way that both seems intrusive and perhaps gets in the way of the story he wants to be telling.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Willis Gets It Right, October 19, 2006

By 

Max Alexander "Author of the upcoming book Br... - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation (Hardcover)

As an armchair mountain climber (I read these books out of amazement that anyone would ever try these stunts), I have to say that author Willis is at the top of the heap. He not only seems to get what's going on in the heads of extreme mountain climbers, but he knows how to convey it--in gripping prose that is never clicheed. I have some of Willis' anthologies of adventure writing, so I know he is well-read in the genre (and a mountaineer himself). He has clearly absorbed the best of that writing, and turned it into something fresh in his own effort. Paradoxically, for a story that celebrates a bunch of social misfits, the book is full of wisdom about how to live life. This is no ordinary biography. As for the actual climbing passages--good luck putting this book down. I had to force myself not to flip ahead and see who dies next.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FIlling in the story, December 3, 2007

By 

Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation (Hardcover)

Back in the 1980s, when I was slaving away in grad school, escaping occasionally for a brief hiking trip, or a short cross-country ski outing, I liked to read stories of great expeditions and adventures, on sea and on land. And I think of all the books I read, Chris Bonnington's books of his expeditions were my greatest escape literature. Sitting in my downtown apartment I was transported to the slopes of Everest with Bonnington and his crew, making my way of a narrow rock gully on the face of Everest. When I was out on my skis in the woods, I'd imagine I was working my way through the ice fall, or carrying gear up to advance base camp.

Then in 2000 I read Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air", his personal story of the tragic 1996 Everest expedition, and it stripped away all romance from Himalayan mountaineering; all I was left with was images of pointless death and selfish behavior. I stopped reading mountaineering books. Every trip seemed a pointless risk of human life. Then a few weeks ago I came across "The Boys of Everest" while looking for cross-country ski technique books, and my curiosity was piqued; I bought the book.

Like some of the reviewers, I'm a bit put off by the author's use of imagined interior monologue, especially when depicting the last hours of a climber who disappeared into the mists, never to be seen again. But at the same time, I think Willis does a better job than most writers- including the mountaineers themselves- in explaining exactly why they climb, and why they take such unimaginable risks in pursuit of such intangible rewards. While this doesn't justify the deaths of so many ambitious young men, at the same time it makes them a bit easier to understand.

Some have also faulted the author for his lack of experience in high altitude climbing, and lack of technical detail, or glossing over some important aspect of a given climb. I'm not a climber, and I suspect that most readers won't be, either, and to us, that's not really a fault. There are better books about the specifics of these expeditions written by the climbers themselves, and plenty of books about the techniques of mountaineering. What this book does deliver is a bit of a glimpse intothe lives and the minds of a very select group of men, who changed the face of climbing, and who for a very brief time in the history of the world stood on top of it.