Customer Reviews

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

George Mallory is one of the names that those interested in Mt. Everest probably know in some detail. He's a legend, the man who disappeared not far from Everest's peak in 1924, and leading to the mystery if Hillary and Norgay were actually the first two to make the summitt.

But, often, that's ALL he is, just a legend, without a person behind all the effort. That's what he was to me. Sort of "this other guy tried to climb Everest, but he didn't make it." Then when he was found in 1999, it added to the legend, but still not the person. I thought it was neat at the time, finding him after all those years; a mystery solved.

"Into the Silence" provides the context and combination of vast research so a reader sees Mallory as the full-color adventurer of his time. It wasn't that he simply set out to climb Everest; what makes the story so vast is author Wade Davis' careful walkthrough of the decades of planning and imagination that were required by him and many others for years before his climb. Davis describes the entire story, in pinpoint - often heart-wrenching, though sometimes boring - detail. It makes the reader appreciate how impossible the 1924 effort really was, how so far ahead of their time were Mallory and Sandy Irvine. It's fair to compare it to the moon landing - it never should have worked, not with the equipment they had. And unfortunately, for Mallory and Irvine it didn't work.

The epic scope takes readers from the World War I battlefields to colonial India to Everest's North Col in equal detai and description. No part of the journey receives lesser treatment.

Sometime that is too much. The book is nearly 700 pages, and of course it could be edited. Some of the early history of Tibet-English encounters is important, but overwhelms some early chapters. With dozens of relevant names, there are times the 'characters' run together and I had to flip back pages to remember who they were. But, Davis clearly decided to err on the side of comphrehensive information. It might slow down at times, but that's an acceptable flaw. The discovery of Everest, the long process to scout, plot and scheme the best way to make an attempt, all build the narrative.

The World War I scenes are ghastly. One has to wonder that if network television had presented live footage from the trenches of the Somme if there would ever have been another war; one especially wonders how the veterans of that war on either side would send their sons to fight another one in barely 20 years. English newspapers presented lies about "victories" and its no wonder that the deep cynicism of returning veterans like Mallory would lead them to far-off adventures of impossible dreams. After WWI, I can't see how any veteran could go back to a normal life.

The men are far from perfect - they are filled with colonial prejudices, upper-class snobbery and petty jealousies; but the flaws show the real people behind the effort.

The book is five-stars, but it's silly to even measure it by that scale. It's a human tragedy within humanity's best efforts. Like the Challenger and Columbia astronauts weren't trying to be national martyrs, when you see Mallory on the page - Mallory and all who helped him - you realize that Mallory wasn't trying to be a legend or mystery; he wanted to achieve this mighty goal and then come back down.

If you have any interest at all in understanding what it is like to attempt to conquer the tallest mountain in the world, your search has ended. This is the book for you. As you know, sometimes a book can surprise you. Expecting one thing the reader is startled to find another. This is the way it is with Wade Davis' treatment of George Mallory's three attempts to be the first person to climb to the summit of Mount Everest. No worthwhile detail is spared in the writing of this book.

Davis accomplishes three major goals in writing this book, whether they were intended or not we do not know, but this is what you get out of pouring your energy into this book.

1st You will understand mountain climbing. You will learn more about the subject than you could possibly want to know. I would think that this book should be mandatory reading for anyone who is involved in this sport. The agony, the pain, the skills needed, and the sheer willpower to climb this mountain or any mountain is clearly stated, and done so in a powerful narrative that will live beyond the book. You feel the pain of the climbers, and the exhilaration of each success. When they are disappointed, so are you.

2nd You will learn more about World War I referred to at the time as the Great War than you would learn, if you read a book entirely devoted to the war. Author Wade Davis has captured the war in all its detail. From trench warfare, to Mustard gas to the futility of the decisions that were made that unnecessarily cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of English boys in the prime of their lives. No doubt is left in the readers mind that England basically lost its status as the number one military power in the world when it lost a generation of its youth - the country simply never recovered.

3rd You will understand English society, and this specific period of history from about 1924 to 1925. What it means to be part of a class and never able to leave that class? What non-acceptance is like, simply because you did not attend the right schools, or come from the correct family background. There's a reason why generations later when English bands become famous, the players like the Beatles, and others choose to live overseas and not in their native England. It's not just taxation. It's about leaving behind class structure, and freedom. John Lennon to his death always referred to himself as working class.

The BASIS of INTO THE SILENCE

From the 1800's into our present era, mankind has been climbing mountains. As an example the Swiss Alpine Club was founded in 1863. Most climbing occurred in European during attempts to climb European mountains. The real quest occurred beginning in the 1900's with the desire to attempt to climb the Himalayan Mountains many of which were 10,000 to 15,000 feet higher and much more difficult to climb than mountains in Europe. Mount Everest at the summit reaches a height of 29,035.

ORGANIZATION of INTO THE SILENCE

There are 13 chapters in this 576 page narrative, and there are many players. The star however is George Mallory born in 1886, he would go on to take part in three separate expeditions to Mount Everest beginning in the early 1920's. More on Mallory later.

What the author does so successfully is bring each participant in the Everest expeditions into the book in different sections and then spends pages going through the individual biographies. A very large part of each person's background is their experiences in World War I. No horrific detail of battles fought is spared in an attempt to have the reader fully understand what that war was like, and how it affected each soldier for the rest of their lives, and more specifically, each mountain climber.

As a reader I began to understand the Great War and fill in the gaps in my knowledge. The book captured a reality that could never be portrayed in the movies because no one would sit still and watch the reality. These men were formed by their experiences in the war, and it is clear how badly scarred they were by these experiences. Essentially England never recovered and would lose its standing in the world. World War II would simply finish them as a world power in spite of the fact that they were the victors.

THE STORY

George Mallory's three attempts to conquer Mount Everest is what this book is all about. History records that each of Mallory's attempts failed. There is drama in this book. There is action, and pain, and fear, and always HOPE. It is the hope of conquering a goal accompanied by unbelievable hardship in the attempt to realize the goal, which is standing on the summit of the tallest mountain in the world, even if only for a moment.

There is always the element of LUCK. Think about it, one moment you are within a 1000 feet of the summit, looking out 100 miles at unlimited mountains in one direction. The temperature is a pleasant 30 degrees - no wind. An hour later, a storm is coming in from the other direction. Temperatures drop 40 degrees in that hour. The wind goes to 60 miles an hour. You can't stand, you are fighting for your life. Whether you live or die is up to forces you do not control. In the end, the elements can break you, no matter how strong your body is how strong willed you are.

Perhaps you are that strong in both your mind and your body, but one of your companions breaks down. What do you do? Climb to the summit alone and succeeding because you left someone else to die a 1000 feet below? Do you instead abandon the summit and help your companion make it back down to camp and save his life. This is precisely what happened to George Finch in the 1922 expedition. Finch would have made the summit. He was using oxygen and Mallory who preceded him by a day did not. George Finch was accompanied by Geoffrey Bruce, and when Bruce could not go on, Finch made the decision to save Bruce's life rather than go on to fame and fortune. He chose honor.

There is one point in the book when Mallory and two other companions are on a shelf within ten feet of the edge and they must stay the night. They are inside a tent which has a base to the tent. There is an intense storm through the night. Winds are gusting at 70 and 80 miles per hour. They feel the wind at one point begin to pick up the base of the tent, and there is nothing they can do but continue to place their full body weight on that base. Just a little more wind and they would be swept over the side into an abyss that would last for 1000's of feet. Every step on Everest whether thought about or blindly taken can lead to death. That is what this book is all about. You are putting your life on the line for 29,000 feet both up and down the mountain.


Into the Silence is an incredible adventure story for all of us, and readers of all ages. In the end Mallory does not conquer the mountain. England mourns its hero and the hero's death that he embodied. Those that lived while Mallory died do not know how Mallory died. They only know that he died attempting to conquer the summit. They did not know if he made it to the very top or not along with his companion, Sandy Irvine, because they both disappeared high on the North East Ridge. They were sighted less than 1000 feet from the summit before the end.
It took another almost 75 years to begin to unravel the story and learn the truth or as much of the truth as can be learned. An expedition was sponsored to try to find Mallory's remains and with the remains the story of the end. This was 1999. I will not go into that expedition, but they were successful in finding the remains, and most of the mystery. Some still believe Mallory made it to the top, and others have their doubts.

It took 30 additional years after Mallory's last steps before another Brit named Edmund Hillary placed his feet on top of the summit. With him was Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. When asked while on a lecture circuit why are you trying to climb Everest, Mallory responded with the classic, "Because it's there." The real answer is so much more complicated than that and will have you at the edge of your seat for 500 pages. You will not want this book to end, and you will walk away from it, so much richer for the experience. Thank you for reading this review.

Richard Stoyeck

This is a hard book to review because of the mix of good and bad. Davis spent ten years writing and a lifetime reading, the amount of research is epic, it's probably the definitive book on the first three Everest expeditions 1921-24, no small thing considering so many other books. Yet most of the book describes background and logistics with not much time on the mountain by comparison. We learn about the history of the people involved (dozens), history of Tibet, history of WWI, trips to India, trips to Tibet, trips across Tibet, trips back from Tibet. It is highly researched and often boring by its nature since so much happens that is banal. The famous 1924 expedition in which Mallory dies is well told but accounts for only about 50 of 576 pages, or less than 10% of the book. On the other hand there are parts that are really interesting, such as the WWI biographies, and Davis' central theme that the wars silent but ever present influence on the expedition ultimately decided its fate.

The annotated bibliography is equally epic, nearly 50 pages long of recommendations for further reading, it's an impressive Everest Geek-fest, probably the best bibliography of its type and worth owning for alone. I'm not sure who to recommend this book to, certainly anyone who has been to Everest, or with an interest in Himalayan climbing history. If your looking for an introduction to Mallory or a gripping mountain adventure, it may be a long hard climb.

Wade Davis's research is prodigious! You'll find out everything you wanted to know (and perhaps more than that) about the Everest expeditions of the early twenties. The book gets off to a rather slow start, and I found myself wondering when it would get into the good stuff, but after fifty pages or so, I was completely hooked and found it hard to put down. Davis gives a good deal of attention to the experiences of the 1914-18 war; I hadn't realized the extent to which the events of that war affected the lives of almost everyone who was on these expeditions: in fact, a large number of the climbers had not fully recovered from their wounds, physical and mental, suffered in the war. And the author doesn't shrink from a thorough and balanced discussion of Mallory's sexuality.

The book isn't perfect. There's so much detail that I sometimes found myself losing track of who was who: it might have been useful to include a brief roster of each expedition summarizing who the members were. And I'd have liked to hear a bit more about the quixotic Maurice Wilson, who gets only a couple of passing mentions. But these are quibbles. There's a lot of good reading here.

This is a terrific book, and it reads like a multilayered novel. The book travels from the battle fields of WWI, to the living rooms of the Bloomsbury Group, to many of England's upper class schools, to repeated British expeditions to Tibet.

The book examines how the three 1920s British attempts to conquer Mt. Everest, ending with the deaths of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in 1924, were deeply rooted in the trauma of World War I and the loss of the secure Victorian and Edwardian world the explorers had grown up in. The expeditions were partly based in a yearning for a return to the pre-WWI ideas of British supremacy and achievement that had been destroyed by WWI, including the deaths of entire social circles in battle.

The backgrounds of the participants in the expeditions are embedded in the narrative like mini-novels. The book is riveting, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Now the reason I did not give this book five stars is because it has a number of minor but irritating historical inaccuracies. The author has clearly done huge amounts of original research, so the overall "big picture" is accurate, but he desperately needs a fact checker.

Example One: one surgeon character is described as devastated at the loss of an entire Canadian regiment he personally created, allegedly because he had known each soldier since their births. Well, this surgeon arrived in Canada in 1908 and left with his regiment at the onset of WWI. If he had known each trooper since birth, his regiment would have consisted of six year old boys. I think the author was trying to use a metaphor to symbolize the surgeon's feelings of loss.

Example Two: Vera Brittain, author of a WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, is said to have lost her brother Edward in battle before her fiance, Roland. Actually, Roland died first, and Edward was killed several years later.

Example Three: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, is dismissed as merely a domestic tyrant, and his wife as a feeble and defeated person. Recent research has shown that Benson was a much more complex character than a simple bully, and that his wife, far from being merely a submissive victim, was conducting multiple lesbian affairs behind her husband's back. The problems in the marriage were caused by both spouses.

So while the book will fascinate a wide audience and the author's research into a huge variety of original sources dealing directly with the Everest expeditions and WWI appears accurate and staggeringly comprehensive, paradoxically, there are errors in some of the peripheral facts. I hope a second edition of the book will fix these minor errors.

This is a well written and remarkably well researched book. Substantively, however, it ranges from profoundly illuminating and deeply troubling to incidental, innocuous, and far too detailed. Moreover, the decision to use the unimaginable horrors, untold sacrifice, and over-arching pointlessness that characterized World War I as a backdrop for the first British assaults on Mount Everest seems ill-advised. The author would have us see the inter-generational chasm wrought by the War to End All Wars play itself out on Everest. As an historical interpretation or literary device, however, this simply does not work. When all is said and done, one is left wondering if The War and repeated efforts to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain were not, in fact as well as in contrived authorial fancy, simply unrelated.

Though the author's discussion of the horrific and predictable butchery of World War I constitutes a relatively brief part of the book, it is the most graphically insightful and moving section of this long and detailed exposition. I've read other treatments of the nightmare of trench warfare, and I've seen films that purported to document the fact that thousands of soldiers, many of the MIA's, were simply buried alive when tons of earth were thrown into the air by highly explosive shells fired from large artillery pieces. I've also read about the unforeseen consequences of hideously debilitating trench foot, and the insurmountable difficulties of maintaining reasonable levels of sanitation during months in water-logged trenches surrounded by the decaying dead. Nothing else that I've seen or read, however, has made me as acutely aware of this unfathomable loss of life, limb, and spirit as Into the Darkness. The author's descriptions of No-Man's Land are devastating, making one wonder what kept the troops going, especially since they must have known, as at Gallipoli and the Somme, that their commanding officers were disengaged, stupid, egotistically indifferent to their fate, unwilling to acknowledge catastrophic blunders, and willfully unaware of the soldiers' suffering.

The much larger sections of the book, devoted to assaults on Everest and the demanding requirements of that endeavor are, in their own way, equally valuable. The descriptions of the dangers and acute discomfort that were necessarily part and parcel of these efforts make one wonder what kept the climbers going, making it almost impossible to imagine how anyone could have gone back for a second time. The troubles with the sections devoted to climbing lie, in good part, in their excessive attention to details of every kind. Unless the reader is thoroughly familiar with the flora and fauna of the part of the world in which Everest is located, much of this account is just a blur of unfamiliar names. Appreciation of these sections requires the highly specialized knowledge of an entomologist, horticulturist, and geologist, as well as mastery of the the peculiar vocabulary of one who is accustomed to thinking about rocky outcroppings, ice formations, snow fields, and other weather-related phenomena found only at extreme altitudes

Furthermore, the long treks to Everest along varying routes, and the environs of Everest itself, are impossible to understand without a detailed knowledge of the geography of the area. If the author had included a map or two so the reader could better follow his discussion, the value of the book would have been substantially increased. As things stand, the reader is often mystified by an abundance of strange names of rivers and locales whose relative proximity and arrangement are crucial to fathoming decisions made by the climbers. The nature of the complex enterprise becomes lost in a jumble of alien sounding designations that are inter-related in ways that are pretty well inaccessible for one who is not a life-long student of Everest.

Nevertheless, the long-term preparation, dangers, suffering, and precariousness attendant to high-altitude climbing are explained in ways that enable us to understand just how overwhelmingly difficult and demanding an effort it was to try to climb the tallest Himalayan Peak. Here, too, there is an enormous amount of detail, but ii is a good deal easier to follow, and seems essential to fully understanding the daunting nature of the endeavor.

The same applies to climbing the mountain. Having read the story of the complex and physically demanding nature of the work required and the suffering endured, the reader will certainly be deeply impressed by the skill, commitment, and courage of the climbers. Simple survival required them to perform in ways that to a non-climber seem impossibly difficult. Progressing toward the summit in arduous stages, from one precariously placed camp to another, is presented in a way that bears keen-eyed witness to the remarkable ability of world-class mountaineers to turn the overwhelmingly arduous into the routine and ordinary.

Still, how many times is it necessary to tell us that some climbers were appalled at the filth and decay contained in each small Tibetan village, and that this was matter-of-factly tolerated by its inhabitants. Yes, I suppose it's true that Tibetans bathe only once a year, but how many times should we be reminded of this, eventually learning that they do it in September, and that they were a bit unsettled by a British climber seen bathing in the summer? And do we really have to know about George Mallory's sex life at Cambridge, including his tepid involvement with James Strachey and the lust felt for Mallory by Lytton Strachey. And John Maynard Keynes, the brilliant and influential economist and mathematician, while at Cambridge was a homo-erotic "copulating machine," though later in life he wed a beautiful ballerina. So? Yes, most of the climbers moved easily in the British upper class and their habits conformed to the norms prevailing in this social location, good to know, but it sometimes takes us too far off topic.

The thematic connection between The Great War and an obsessive, death-defying commitment to conquering Everest is hard to grasp. That those who had been in The War were inured to death and, therefore, not inhibited by fear of dying is offered as part of the story. But more important, we are told, was the need to achieve something clean, pure, and ultimately redemptive, and this could be accomplished by climbing Everest. Maybe so, but I don't see it. After all, Everest itself was a brutally unforgiving foe, and it, too, caused loss of body parts, loss of life, and loss of sanity. It may well be that climbing Everest was a testimony to the drive toward monumental achievement inherent in the human spirit, but I don't think the case has been made. Perhaps it can't be.

I'm certainly convinced that those who repeatedly tried to do the near-impossible on the highest peak in the Himalayas were brave and hardy souls, extraordinary men of skill, strength, intelligence, and steely determination. Surely, however, there must be something more to heroism than climbing a mountain, no matter how difficult and dangerous the task and no matter how many people it inspires. During a time when Britain was financially depleted by World War I, when unemployment rates were extremely high, and life for millions of returning soldiers and ordinary Britons was a constant struggle that they had not chosen and for which they were not prepared, climbing Everest seems quaintly and disinterestedly upper class British. Given the state of their homeland, it also seems frivolous and wasteful.

Before I read "Into the Silence", I was very aware of the dramatic end of the Mallory/Irvine expedition to Mt. Everest. Two talented climbers just disappeared, and only recently have remains been found to indicate what actually happened. What I was not aware of was the treacherous political path that lead to the British expeditions to conquer the mountain. That journey was fraught with intrique and political posturing. The desire of 20th century geographers to triangulate and calculate the actual shape of the earth was a driving force in creating an expedition, and the story of just getting to go to Mt. Everest is a fascinating story.

Of course, expeditions into the Death Zone on these very high and difficult mountains have become, in the 21st century, available not so much to true mountaineers, but to the well-heeled, so it is easy to forget what a formidable undertaking it was to reach that elusive summit of the world's tallest mountain. . This meticulously researched book tells the tale of the Great War and its horrendous impact on a generation of young men. A few of these young men found vindication on the slopes of Mt. Everest. One of these was George Mallory. Haunted by a British public school upbringing and stymied by years of teaching in that system, Mallory manages to join his peers on the bloody battlefields of Europe. While he returns physically unscathed, he is as troubled beneath the surface as any of the veterans of that dreadful war. His amazing talent for climbing exhibited in his youth was his saving grace, and the undertaking to conquer Everest was his opportunity to break free of the stigma of war. That Mallory was lost on the mountain is a poignant finish to a fascinating account.

This is an all-absorbing read, and, if you like to get lost in a true tale of valor and tragedy that follows the evolution of human and earth science in the early and mid 20th century, you will truly enjoy this book immensely. It offers facts I never encountered before about a time we cannot afford to forget. Carried by a strong narrative, this book is difficult to put down. I suggest buying it in hardback, though. In its uncorrected proof state, bound in paper, it is an unruly book to handle. I hope, too, that there are illustrations in the final publication because I found myself going to the internet again and again to see what this person or that person looked like.

Into the Silence

After devoting two full weeks to this massive book, yesterday I did my own summit push and spent six hours plowing through the final 100 pages, and I must say, I wasn't disappointed. The fate of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine remains one of the greatest mysteries on Everest, but there were so many other factors leading up to the tragic 1924 expedition.

First, The Great War. At the time, no other event in history affected the morale of a nation more than the bloody and devastating war that robbed Britain of its sons and its innocence. A majority of the men involved in the first three voyages to Everest had a role in the war and witnessed atrocities that would change their lives. At first I thought Davis was using the war as a device to generate shock value in portraying gory battle scenes. Then I realized that these men's experiences as soldiers and officers allowed them to tackle a mission with a certain discipline that reflected the attitude of Britain at the height of its imperialism. Thus the sense of patriotism was a driving factor for an entirely English team to be the first to summit the tallest mountain in the world.

Second, the relationship between Tibet and England would determine whether westerners would be allowed to travel through the isolated, mystical country to reach Everest. Davis did a great job outlining Tibet's history, including the slaughter of hundreds of natives by English troops in an attempt at diplomacy at the turn of the century and the Chinese rape and pillaging of Tibet a decade later. Tibet's tumultuous past and its fervent religious practices made its leaders suspicious, but clever negotiations allowed the first team of Englishmen to do their initial reconnaissance of the Everest region.

This preliminary scouting expedition in 1921 was vital to learning about approach to the formidable mountain. I will admit that there was some redundancy and tedium to this lengthy part of the narrative, but all of it was essential to understand the territory and the participants. Mallory, of course, would be involved in all three Everest efforts, but there was a myriad of other climbers and people overseeing logistics, hundreds of local porters and tons of supplies. The second attempt in 1922 brought both new and familiar characters, along with the notion of using supplementary oxygen. Though a number of height records were achieved, injuries, frostbite and a catastrophic avalanche that killed 7 Sherpas would affect future approaches.

The culmination of all the knowledge gained in 1921 and 1922 would be applied to an ambitious attempt in 1924. For Mallory, a return to Everest was both an obsession and carried with it a sense of doom. Despite knowing the outcome of Irvine and Mallory's final summit attempt, the tension of the last 50 pages was excellent. The debate about whether the two climbers ever reached the summit was addressed, but no definitive answer could ever be established. The epilogue was essential, covering the aftermath, Hillary's successful summit 20 years later, and the discovery of Mallory's body in 1999. Davis's meticulous and extensive research lends authority to the entire epic struggle with Everest in the 20's, and the use of diary excerpts and letters made it feel very authentic. I can say with confidence that this is probably the most comprehensive examination of the incredible efforts put forth by Mallory and each of the individuals involved who were determined to conquer Everest.

On 08 June 1924, British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine went missing on the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest. Their disappearence created an enduring mystery only partially resolved by the discovery of Mallory's remains in 1999, on a slope below the Northeast Ridge. The topic has been explored in numerous books, and even the interested reader might wonder what more author Wade Davis might have to offer with 2011's "Into The Silence."

Davis' approach is to take a step back, relying on ten years of exhaustive research to closely examine the British climbers who first attempted Everest. As Davis discovers, the men were members of a fated generation, brought up in the full splendor of Imperial Britain, most of whom underwent the life-changing horrors of the First World War. Those experiences were their motivation to conquer the world's tallest mountain, and to run extraordinary risks on Everest.

The connecting thread in the narrative is George Mallory, handsome, athletically gifted, and connected to leading elements of pre-war British society. He was said to be the finest climber to survive the war, a first choice for the three expeditions to Everest, and leader of the final summit attempt.

Davis takes his time getting to Everest, spending a full third of the book introducing the pre-war climbing fraternity, their experiences in the Great War, and the decision to take on Everest. His narrative of the 1921, 1922, and 1924 expeditions are an epic of exploration of an ummapped and virtually unknown region, and a startling revelation of just how little was understood about the effects of high altitude and extreme cold.

Davis wrings considerable suspense from his account of the heroic but doomed final expedition, as the climbers raced the weather and their dwindling resources for a chance at the summit. The thoughtful reader may be left with a sense of wonder at their perseverence despite primitive clothing and gear. Davis saves for an epilogue his final comments and speculation.

"Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest" is very highly recommended to readers with a strong interest in mountaineering and the history of Everest. Davis provides as much context and insight into the early expeditions and the mystery of Mallory and Irvine as may be possible without the discovery of more physical evidence.

unfortunately the climbing doesn't really occupy much of the book. We hear about WWI, the British, Britain as a superpower, Tibet, and the biographies of EVERY single person mentioned in the story. It's slow going at first--I felt like I was reading a high school textbook on WWI at times. After about 100-150 pages it gets better. The parts on Everest are just awesome--richly detailed, absorbing, awe-inspiring, heroic. Truly fascinating reading. This book is meticulously researched, maybe too much so. I understand that the War totally changed the history of the world and Great Britain in particular, and that without the war the expedition to Everest might not have occurred. I understand all of that, but I could've gotten by on less description. I guess I was expecting more of a "Into Thin Air" sort of book, which this is not. It's more of a history book that happens to include the expedition to Everest. However, the expedition itself is awesome--if you can get through the historical research, or happen to love history, you will love this book. It is extremely well written and authoritative.