The Kid Who Climbed Everest [Hardcover]

Bear Grylls (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

Four years ago, a twenty-one-year-old soldier in the British Army named Bear Grylls was flying over an African desert on a routine parachute jump. He had a lot to look forward to - a long career ahead of him in the Army, a beautiful girlfriend back home. But those dreams were cut short when his parachute failed to open at eleven thousand feet.

He had cracked three vertebrae and come within a fraction of severing his spinal cord, which would have paralyzed him for life. A grueling eight months of physical therapy followed. Bear had to retrain his muscles to do all of the things we take for granted - how to sit, stand, walk, even breathe.

Bear endured over seventy days on Everest's southeast face. Eighteen months after his accident, at the age of twenty-three, he overcame extreme weather conditions and months of limited sleep to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain.

The Kid Who Climbed Everest is a tale of courage, perseverance, and determination, and climbing the world's tallest mountain is only half of this remarkable story. Bear's quest for funding for his expedition (including an unannounced raid for sponsorship money at the mansion-home of the president of Virgin Airways, Richard Branson), his seventy days on Everest's southeast face, and a narrow brush with death after a fall into a crevasse at nineteen thousand feet make the story of the youngest Englishman to climb Everest an essential read for anyone who's ever had a dream and made it come true.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Everest," writes British climber Bear Grylls, "is no place to prove yourself. The likelihood of reaching the summit is so slim that you're inevitably setting yourself up to be disappointed."

But, Grylls continues, mountains are most definitely an arena where alpinists express their deepest drives, and he had more ambition than most. Badly injured in a parachuting accident in 1996, he resigned his army commission and cast about for a new career--a decision he succeeded in putting off by enlisting in a climbing expedition to the world's tallest mountain. Now, Grylls points out, the odds of a well-conditioned climber's making the summit of Everest are something like one in a hundred; for climbers under the age of 30, who lack the experience and conditioning that age brings, those odds slim down to 1 in 1,000. Twenty-three at the time, Grylls took his chances nonetheless, despite the "sinking feeling that I had just made a commitment that was going to drag me a little too far out of my comfort zone."

He fulfilled his commitment, though surely not without discomfort, scared but determined, making his way up deadly obstacles such as the Lhotse Face Icewall and its deep crevasses. Other climbers were not so lucky, he writes in this you-are-there account of his time on the mountain, and death is a constant presence on these pages--which may deter readers who seek to follow in his footholds. For those content to travel up sheer rock and ice walls vicariously, though, Grylls's book is a spirited exercise in adventure writing and a promising debut. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

For a year, Grylls held the record for the Youngest Englishman on the Hill for his summit ascent at age 23 (only to be bested the following year by a 22-year-old). Grylls, while serving in the army, suffered a parachuting accident that nearly severed his spinal cord. After eight months in a military rehab center, he decided to leave the military and climb the legendary Everest. Barely escaping death (he fell into a crevasse at 19,000 feet), he reached the summit just 18 months after his accident. Unfortunately, Grylls's account of 70 days on Everest has a flat pitch, stiff syntax and little insight to offer on the experience of reaching for the top of the world save earnest observations on grit, body functions at high altitudes, his grandpa, faith, queen and country. The transcendent folly and physical drama of climbing above 26,000 feet were sharp narrative tools in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, but the Kid can't quite elaborate on how he felt as he passed the decayed, mummified body of Rob Hall, who tragically failed to scale the summit ridge. Grylls's report from the top of the world is almost without discernible color except the "bully" attitude Grylls and his mates brought along from England and took back home after a few celebratory ales in Kathmandu. His story adds little to the ever-expanding Everest genre. (May) Forecast: No matter how unexceptional they might appear to the uninitiated, diehard Everest fans never seem to tire of books like this. The effusive blurb from British Prime Minister Tony Blair certainly won't hurt sales, either.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 316 pages
• Publisher: The Lyons Press; 1st edition (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585742503
• ISBN-13: 978-1585742509
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,147,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic!, November 9, 2002

By 

Liz Brown (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kid Who Climbed Everest (Hardcover)

Someone once commented on this book saying that they had "read better accounts of climbing a mountain" but in saying that I think they have entirely missed the point of the book!

I picked it up and was unable to put it down. Maybe it isn't the best piece of literature around but is certainly one of the most honest. I was gripped by Bear's account of events, emotions, respect, friendship and faith and finished the book feeling both exhausted and inspired!

I would recommend this book to anyone that feels they are incapable of achieving anything greater than life behind a desk.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Like a letter from an old friend, July 15, 2003

By 

Justbooking - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Kid Who Climbed Everest (Hardcover)

Climbing Mt. Everest at the tender age of 23 is a great feat in itself. Only one in a thousand climbers under the age of thirty in top physical shape ever reach the summit.

What people don't know is that Bear Grylls had just recovered from an accident that nearly claimed his life, after his parachute tore at 11,000 feet during an Army training exercise. After spending months in rehab recovering from a broken back, he decided to follow an impossible dream.

There are few surprises here - you know the ending from the title alone. However, his tales of adventure, close calls, and vivid and very candid descriptions of life in the mountain will keep you reading and cheering him on!

Although his prose pales somewhat when compared to literary classics such as "Into Thin Air", and he lacks the experience and knowledge of legendary climbers such as the original "Kid", David Breashears ("High Exposure"), what he lacks in these areas he more than makes up in his enthusiasm, humor, and love of life. You cannot help but wonder what the older, more experienced climbers he is compared to - or even you - were doing at his age.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars what an adventure!, February 25, 2007

By 

Kimberley Wilson (VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Kid Who Climbed Everest (Hardcover)

At 23 Bear Grylls decided that he was going to seed and needed to do something so he and a buddy went off to Mt. Everest. He wrote a book about the experience and it left me alternately laughing and awed. First, forget what you think you know about mountain climbing. Getting to Everest is an experience in itself that requires close encounters with bathrooms that are really just huts with mountains of other people's poop on the floor, diarrhea (inevitable-- the locals are none too clean and unless you want to offend them by not eating or drinking with the them you will get a stomach bug and/or a severe respiratory infection) and air sickness which can kill you if you don't attend to it right away. And because there's no place to bathe you will stink and after awhile even the female yaks will avoid you. Vomiting plays a big role in attacking Everest. On the very first night getting acclimated Bear was serenaded by the sounds of his buddy chundering into his boots. It's not romantic and not a bit like the adventure movies.

Still, Bear has a sense of humor and being 23 at the time he made the absolute grossness of it all incredibly funny. He starts out as a sweetly goofy kid (much "younger" than I was at that age)and gets more serious as he goes up the mountain. He has a couple of nearly deadly close encounters and life in the Death Zone of the mountain is not cute at all.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and was sorry to come to the last page.