Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend [Hardcover]

Robert Roper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2002

Willi Unsoeld became an international hero during the Kennedy years, when he emerged as probably the greatest American climber of the Himalayan golden age. Displaying the sort of vigor that President Kennedy so admired, Unsoeld became the most visible hero of an ascent of Everest's previously-unclimbed West Ridge -- an ascent that cost him parts of both feet and nearly his life.

His casual fearlessness and physical power established the template for extreme adventure, and his lectures as a charismatic professor inspired the generation of the sixties to test itself in acts of physical daring. Fatal Mountaineer sets Willi Unsoeld's intense life against the story of two defining adventures: the triumph on Everest and a more ill-starred expedition in 1976, when he led a group of mountaineers up a new route on Nanda Devi, the tallest peak in India. One of that gifted group of climbers was Willi's daughter, Devi -- a golden girl named for the mountain she sought to ascend with her beloved father. The intense rivalries within the expedition team, and the dangers of the route, led to an outcome darkened by tragedy, an outcome that continues to fuel one of the most tormenting debates in mountaineering history.

Blending adventure with a frank look at the cultural background, Fatal Mountaineer considers the pressures on mountaineers in a period of our history torn by conflict. It balances hunger for fame with stark tragedy, a man's ambition with a father's love. Unsoeld emerges as an American classic, a self-invented genius of adventure to rank with Mark Twain or Will Rogers for sheer attractiveness. Under the close scrutiny of this thrilling story, his heroism turns out to be deeply authentic-as does his suffering.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Unsoeld, who made the first ascent of Mt. Everest's West Ridge in 1963, was perhaps the most influential high-altitude mountain climber of the 1960s and 1970s; as a professor of philosophy at Evergreen State College, he was also an entertaining and "spellbinding" lecturer. The bulk of Roper's gripping biography describes Unsoeld's 1976 Indo-American Nanda Devi Expedition, which he conceived as a tribute to both to the first ascent of India's tallest peak in 1936 and to his 22-year-old daughter, Devi, who was named after the mountain and who joined the expedition as the fulfillment of a dream. Roper presents the troubled expedition marked by infighting, sickness and Devi's death from intestinal problems just short of the peak as a "sea-change" in climbing: whereas "the ethos of camaraderie" had been essential in Unsoeld's 1963 ascent, by the mid-'70s, it had disappeared. ("As Tom Wolfe declared," Roper writes, "it was the `Me Decade.' ") Through an analysis of Unsoeld's graduate studies in philosophy, Roper shows how the Nanda Devi climb was, in many respects, the realization of Unsoeld's belief that when an "outcome is shadowed by doubt and you may well be on a suicide mission, you feel most intensely alive." But in the two years of life that remained to him (he died in a Mt. Rainier avalanche in 1979), Roper argues that Unsoeld was "devoted to an active refusal to recognize what had happened." This is a provocative look at a still-legendary climber. Two 8-page b&w photo inserts not seen by PW.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A spirit-seeking hippie before hippies even existed, mountaineering legend Willi Unsoeld named his daughter after India's tallest peak: Nanda Devi. Twenty-two years later, in 1976, Nanda Devi died on Nanda Devi. Her fate, her father's attitude about climbing, and mountaineering's transition from amateur hobby to slick commercial enterprise are all covered in this book. Roper does not offer a biography (a niche filled by Lawrence Leamer's Ascent, 1982) but, rather, sorts out conflicting accounts of Unsoeld's dissension-wracked expedition to Nanda Devi. Ostensibly undertaken to commemorate its first summitting in 1936, the expedition's real motive was to facilitate Nanda Devi's intimate communing with her eponym. Famed as half the duo that first climbed Everest via its western ridge in 1963, Unsoeld was past his prime 13 years later. So the group included a younger, stronger alpinist named John Roskelly, who was not looking for Hindu deities or self-actualization; he hoped to become an entrepreneurial guide. Not the smoothest of narratives, Roper's story of the conflict will nevertheless gain purchase with fans of adventure books. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (March 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261535
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261535
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #846,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Where's Willi?, August 30, 2002

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend (Hardcover)

Picture thousands of notes on 3" x 5" file cards and 100 pages of John Roskelly's "Nanda Devi, The Tragic Expedition". Throw them up in the air. Wherever they land, pick them up and submit them as a manuscript. That is the only way I can conceive this disorganized, unedited book was published.

It is hard to categorize this book. It is not a biography (see Laurence Leamer's "Ascent"). It is not a memoir; I don't believe the author knew Willi Unsoeld in life. "Fatal Mountaineer" concentrates mainly on three defining moments in Willi's life: his brilliant traverse of Everest via the West Ridge in 1963 when Unsoeld was at the peak of his ability, the tragic death of his daughter Devi on her namesake mountain, and Willi's death in an avalanche on Mt. Rainier at age 54. There are explanations and definitions of Bergson and John Muir's philosophies throughout. These two philosophers supposedly had a significant influence on Willi's spiritual outlook.

Sometimes it was hard to tell who was the main subject of this book, Willi or John Roskelly. The author seems to have a love/hate relationship toward Roskelly referring to him as the "Buffalo Demon" and a wily self-promoter while praising his mountaineering abilities to the skies. Mr. Roper's extensive quoting from Roskelly's book is unacknowledged by the author except for an asterisk on page 265.

The Nanda Devi climb that culminated in the mysterious death of Unsoeld's daughter, aged 22, is given the most attention. As the expedition leader and as a father, Unsoeld's behavior was strange to say the least; his exploitation of this tragedy afterward via lectures, slideshows, and presentations was inexcusable. His death in an avalanche while a leading a student expedition in the dead of winter was his last tragedy in that he took another 22 year-old girl with him. His judgment was fatally flawed to even think of taking such an inexperienced group on such a venture. It speaks well for the other 20 students that they managed to survive.

When closing the book, I had gained no additional insights about this compelling, charismatic man who had great leadership abilities, was larger than life and had a continual adoring coterie of fans around him right up to and including the time of his death. Mr. Roper obviously had no endorsement from Unsoeld's family, he cites no printed sources, has no endnotes, and no bibliography. The book seemed nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fatal Mountaineer, January 19, 2003

By 

Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend (Hardcover)

I do not recommend this book because I knew Willi Unsoeld, and this book does not talk about the man I knew. Willi was my teacher in the classroom and in the mountains and I spent many hours with him. The author does not capture the spirit or the vitality of Willi Unsoeld and actually wrote this book against the wishes of Willi's family. Even the title of this book is offensive to people who knew Willi because it is so far from the man who really existed. The author includes many assumptions and speculations about Willi that are far off the mark. I would love a book that explored Willi's life and his remarkable accomplishments, but this is not it.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Full of inaccuracies and distortions--save your money!, October 15, 2002

By 

S. Reynolds (Washington state, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend (Hardcover)

I agree whole-heartedly with sweetmolly's review--it's a fair assessment and right on. Further, I can add that "Fatal Mountaineer" is full of distortions and inaccuracies, more than I have ever seen in any mountaineering novel intended to be non-fiction.

Myself being a writer, a collector of mountaineering lit, a climber, and knowing about Willi's life and his expeditions, I was highly disappointed in this book. Overall, the book and subject were very poorly researched; bad preparation and bad writing go hand-in-hand. Knowing that many of Roper's statements are nothing more than second-hand, inaccurate speculations, it was painfully difficult to read. Besides painting John Roskelley as an "enfant terrible" and "buffalo demon" (both of which he is not) throughout the entire novel, Robert Roper (no relation to honorable climber-writer Steve Roper) couldn't even spell Roskelley's name correctly. Never are there citings or resources given--nor is there defined reasoning--for Roper's speculation and suppositions, of which this is one: "Roskelly (sic) is a special sort of bully, someone who tromps all over others in their most uncertain places, who gets his way by his willingness to say hateful things."

If you're thinking of reading Roper's "Fatal Mountaineer," don't. Read instead Roskelley's first-hand account of the expedition that fills most pages of Roper's novel, "Nanda Devi: The Tragic Expedition." And even though it has it's own shortcomings, a much better biography of Unsoeld is Lawrence Leamer's "Ascent: The Spiritual and Physical Quest of the Legendary Mountaineer Willi Unsoeld."

It's obvious the reviewers here who gave more than a couple stars to "Fatal Mountaineer" have not read Roskelley's book, nor were they previously knowledgable about Unsoeld's life and his tragic Nanda Devi expedition. I'm sure they would have thought differently had this piece of fiction not been their introduction to Willi Unsoeld. While Unsoeld was not perfect, he was a great man and mountaineer, and his memory deserves better than this false attempt of a treatise. And the same is true for John Roskelley, who Roper especially--and wrongly--excoriated.