Into The Silence

The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
by Wade Davis

My Review

This was an intriguing book and, although I knew a bit about Mallory, it dealt in considerable detail and most insightful. The parts about the various characters lives prior to the attempts on Everest were very interesting and well written.  In particular the events of the first world war were quite eye opening for me as I was quite unaware of the culpability and absolute stupidity of the generals running the war and the extent of the carnage they caused.
 
It was the longest book I have read for  many a day and took a long time to read, but it never became tedious or heavy going.

rating 4/5

Book Publicity

A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.
In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.
For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Maverick Mountaineer

 

 

Maverick Mountaineer

by

Robert Wainwright

 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

My review

Interesting story of a very competent planner of mountain climbs and highly skilled.  Also an extremely good chemist
 
I did enjoy reading this and was quite interested in how advanced George Finch was as far as mountaineering equipment.  He made himself down clothing whilst all other climbers were in traditional woollen clothes and jackets.   He also used lots of layering with clothing to achieve levels of warmth.  Finch was a pioneer and advocate of using oxygen for Himalayan peaks much to the consternation of most others and had to fight hard to convince them.
 
A chunk of the book deals with the Everest expeditions of 1921  and 1922 and the rivalry with Mallory.  Because of the nasty nature of the English alpine club establishment George Finch was not asked to go on the ill fated 1924 expedition.  He was barred from the 1921 one and it was only because he was the best mountaineer living in England, although Australian by birth; a factor that also the stuffy establishment resented.

 

Book Publicity

The first full-length biography of George Ingle Finch - maverick Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch.

George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing. A World War I hero whose skills also helped save London from burning to the ground during the Blitz of World War II, he was a renowned scientist who was personally chosen by Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, to help lead his nation into the modern world.

With a private life torn by war and misguided by social norms, a reputation as an outsider among the British alpine climbing establishment, and some rough and ready 'colonial' habits, Finch was a brilliantly colourful character - so why has he vanished from the pages of history? In this first full-length biography, Robert Wainwright surveys the man who is now best known as the father of Academy award-winning actor Peter Finch - but who was so much more.

A Day to Die For - 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - The Untold True Story by Graham Ratcliffe

This is both a book about mountaineering and investigative writing.   In part it deals with Graham Ratcliffe's alpine climbing, but it generally does so to show how it related to the events of May 1996 when  a number of climbers died on Mount Everest.  He doesn't go into too much detail about his climbs which is good from my perspective.   Graham was high on the mountain when the tragedy arose and was left wondering what would have happened if his team new had been called upon to help with the rescue.     
Eventually, but after several years had elapsed, the event came to so haunt him that he spent many years of his life as he painstakingly tried to establish if weather predictions were known by the leaders of the mountaineering teams and, if so, why did they ignore these dire predictions.    Serious questions are also raised about the avoidance of these matters by people who wrote books about the tragedy, especially Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air) and David Breashears (High Exposure).

 

Rating  3/5