My Quest for Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery (Hardcover)

by Reinhold Messner (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Reinhold Messner, the famed Austrian alpinist, has spent much of three decades climbing in the Himalayas--and, as it turns out, looking along the way for evidence of the yeti, the legendary, supposedly humanoid inhabitant of the high mountains. Messner writes of having encountered "an apparition" at the Tibetan headwaters of the Mekong River. Remembering a photograph of a mysteriously shaped footprint that Eric Shipton had taken years earlier, Messner began to collect evidence--tracks, eerie cries and whistles, fleeting glimpses--of the fabled abominable snowman. With that mounting evidence, he writes, "the mountains that I knew so well now seemed smothered in mystery." Of the yeti's existence, the climber has no doubt; his pages are taken up by his quest for plausible answers as to the creature's real identity. He writes of possibilities that many scientists have discounted--for instance, that the yeti may be a kind of ape, or perhaps a long-diverged species of bear--dismissing knee-jerk unbelievers with an impatient wave, and turning in a lively natural history of an unknown being.

With this memoir, Messner is in good literary company--Peter Matthiessen and Slavomir Rawicz, among others, have written of high-mountain encounters with yetis--and in fine form. Readers with an interest in cryptozoology and mountaineering alike will delight in his findings. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
The first human to climb Everest without bottled oxygen, and the first to summit the world's 14 highest peaks, Messner is a legend in mountaineering circles. How appropriate, then, that he should take on another legend associated with mountains--the yeti, aka the Abominable Snowman. Messner's quest to uncover the truth behind the legend begins in July 1986, in Tibet, where, at night, deep in that country's eastern wilderness, he encounters something: "the creature towered menacingly, its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline. Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms." On and off for the next 11 years, Messner undertakes expeditions through Tibet and Bhutan in search of that creature. In time, he learns to distinguish between the myth of the yeti ("a collective term for all the monsters of the Himalayas, real or imagined") and the animal on which the myth is based, which he realizes is known throughout the region as the chemo or dremo, and which he concludes is a type of brown bear (Ursus arctus), which he observes several times. That conclusion will disappoint readers looking for evidence of a missing link or humanoid bigfoot, but even so there's plenty of high adventure in the book, as Messner treks across snowy wastelands, gets lost, gets arrested, sleeps in smoky tents and under the stars--and describes both the history of yeti research and the ongoing eradication of Tibetan culture at the hands of Chinese invaders. An engaging blend of travelogue and cryptozoological inquiry, this book will make a great campfire read.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312203942
• ISBN-13: 978-0312203948
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,248,484 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Theory-Schmery -- excellent book!, April 29, 2000

By	C. Preston (Woodinville, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Since this book came out in 1998 in German -- yet somehow the whole world wasn't talking about it -- I figured that the ultimate answer to the yeti mystery was not to be held inside before I bought it. Thus, I was neither surprised nor disappointed by his conclusions that the chemo (bear) was the yeti. I did not feel the bipedal aspect of the myth and regular reports was adequately addressed, but then again, I can't say I much cared. This is an adventure book like no other. Being regularly arrested and detained by the Chinese, climbing 8,000+ meter peaks, chased by packs of dogs, braving conditions Westerners don't approach in horror movies -- amazing stuff! Like "Into Thin Air" (J. Krakauer), Messner begins the tale with the height of climactic action, just great! Messner should be applauded for the effort to address lore left mainly to tabloids in a serious, important, groundbreaking (if for no other reason than the wealth of his experience in the Himalayas), and meaningful way. Certain enjoyment for anyone with a pulse _and_ a brain. Messner, Brashears, Krakauer -- does high altitude create great writers? Ed Viesturs, you need to join this crowd with some regular submissions of _your_ adventures on the 8,000+ peaks!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good adventure, Questionable zoology, April 23, 2000

By	Matthew A. Bille (Colorado Springs, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Messner's book is really two books: one, a well-written adventure story; the other, a confusing attempt to show the yeti is a large and very strange type of brown bear. Whatever one thinks of the yeti, the bear hypothesis seems a poor fit. Messner describes yetis routinely walking and even running on two feet and includes photographs of an ordinary-looking brown bear he claims is the mysterious bipedal chemo, or yeti. Messner knows the land and its people well, but seems not to have done much research on bears. This is a worthwhile addition to the literature on this subject, but Messner has not found the definitive solution to the yeti mystery.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, April 30, 2000

By	Greg Broiles (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's worth picking up in a library, but I was disappointed after paying the hardcover price following a favorable review in Outside magazine. It's really two books in one, as another reviewer said - a book about the author's search for the Yeti of myth, and a few chapters about an obscure kind of bear. Apparently the author thinks that the Yeti stories are basically Tibetan legens about the bear; that's a great theory, but I'm not sure it's worthy of the sensationalistic title/cover that this book has.