Amazon.com Review
Drawing on more than 40 years of experience in the high country, photographer John Cleare has paired some of his finest images with inspired essays from renowned mountaineers to produce Distant Mountains, a tour among some of the world's most spectacular peaks. The writing--impressively engaging for a large-photography format--combines the genre's contemporary and classic writers, from Nicholas Crane, recipient of the 1993 Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Mungo Park medal, to late African explorer H.W. Tilman. A host of other notables fill the pages, telling of ascents in Scotland, the Alps, Patagonia, east Africa, the Canadian Rockies, India, Pakistan, the Peruvian Andes, the Pyrenees, the southwestern United States, and, of course, Nepal.
Distant Mountains is more an inspirational photographic and literary showcase than a guidebook, although a brief factfile is tucked at the end of each essay section. The factfiles include a map and background of the mountain region described, recommended access, and climbing and trekking ideas--enough to motivate the serious mountaineer to further inquiry.
There is plenty here to elevate the reader to the high snows, but rather than provide a fresh look at the great peaks and those who climb, it maintains a retrospective feel throughout. Still, this is an engaging work, sure to catapult readers from the armchair into the foothills. --Byron Ricks
Product Description
For untold ages, the awesome power of the world's greatest mountains has lifted our spirits, inspired our imaginations, and fed our sense of adventure. Indeed, such legendary peaks as Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro, and Annapurna represent the ultimate challenge to the human spirit.
Now, in its continuing quest to bring the world's wonders to lovers of knowledge and exploration, Discovery Channel Books presents Distant Mountains, a celebration of magnificent summits and the adventurers who overcame adversity and danger to conquer them.
Distant Mountains showcases over 150 full-color photographs by mountaineering's most respected photographer. An experienced climber, John Cleare has spent his life scaling famous ranges, including the Western Alps, the Canadian Rockies, the Scottish Highlands, the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas, and Chilean Patagonia, to bring back extraordinary, diverse images of vast mountainscapes, treacherous glaciers, crystalline icefalls, and snow-clad summits.
Accompanying these arresting images are dramatic essays from ten world-renowned mountaineers who have braved their own mountain odysseys. These evocative accounts--marked by awe and exhilaration, achievement and disappointment, fear and relief--will transport the reader to exotic and far-reaching locales, including the sublime, low-altitude peaks of Scotland's Western Isles, the intriguing monoliths of Arizona, the ice-fluted walls of the Peruvian Andes, and the savage spires of the Karakorum of Pakistan. In addition, Cleare provides his own narrative on Chilean Patagonia.
With its visual grandeur, enthralling storytelling, and informative "fact-file" sections that follow each chapter, Distant Mountains is an important addition to the genre of mountain literature and a must-have book for both the active and armchair enthusiast.
