My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks [Hardcover]

Jerzy Kukuczka (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Polish

Product Details

• Hardcover: 189 pages
• Publisher: Mountaineers Books (August 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898863449
• ISBN-13: 978-0898863444
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,001,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An overlooked treasure, July 14, 1998

By 

John Lacey (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks (Hardcover)

This overlooked book by the second man (after Reinhold Messner) to climb the world's fourteen 8000m peaks is a treasure. I found this a more emotional book than Jon Krakauer's /Into Thin Air/. This book gave me a better sense of what it's like to climb the highest mountains in the world, and a better sense of the unavoidable tragedies that occur there.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book by a great climber, May 19, 2001

By 

Marcin K. Porwit (Bellevue, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks (Hardcover)

This is one of those rare autobiographies that manages to perfectly convey the incredible experiences that the author went through without self-aggrandization. Kukuczka is very modest in his accounts, telling the stories as if the events that befell him were the most normal in the world. The book gives great insight into what made Jerzy go forth and climb and also provides a great account of his day-to-day reality of organizing expeditions and the thrill of being in the mountains again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving and honest reporting from the greatest climber of all, April 22, 1999

By 

Arun Mahajan (Palo Alto, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks (Hardcover)

This is a great work. Leaves you in awe of Jerzy. He is a pure mountaineer, untrapped by the modern fad and not the one in search of fame or glory. His love of the Himalaya shines through. The amount of untold suffering and privation that he underwent to summit the hardest and the highest peaks in the world. He is a heroic and doomed figure, like some norse god. As you read the book and go through the chapters and read him talk of his friends that died on the mountains, you realise that it is only a matter of time before he will meet the same fate. One thinks that maybe Anatoly Boukreev might have been something like him. The hardship that Jerzy had to undergo to even get to the peaks is amazing. He was unsparing on himself, braving all that the mountains had to throw at him. A great man.