The Boys of Everest
Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
•The exploits of mountaineering’s most colorful band of adventurers
The Boys of Everest by Clint Willis tells the gripping story of “Bonington’s Boys,” a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest’s first ascent. It is a story of tremendous courage, astonishing achievement, and heartbreaking loss. Chris Bonington’s inner circle included a dozen of mountaineering’s most legendary figures—Don Whillans, John Harlin, Dougal Haston, Doug Scott, Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker, and others—who together gave birth to a new brand of climbing. They took increasingly challenging risks on now-legendary expeditions to the world’s most fearsome peaks—and they paid an enormous price. Most of them died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: was it worth it?
“Willis's classy style turns reportage into literature . . . Bonington's Boys come across as raw, anguished souls . . . As Willis describes in his artful prose, their suffering is not just a means to an end (the summit), it is an end.” –The New York Times
“A gripping adventure saga . . .”–Publishers Weekly
“A death-haunted saga of the scalers of heaven . . .” –Kirkus Reviews
“Mr. Willis tells a story that is gripping and poignant and even appalling . . .” –The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With nowhere to go but down after the 1953 conquest of Mt. Everest, mountain climbing was reinvigorated by the group of young British daredevils celebrated in this gripping adventure saga. Journalist and mountain-climber Willis (Epic) profiles elder statesman Bonington and such climbing legends as the truculent working-class prodigy Don Whillan, the austere ex-seminarian Joe Tasker and the perpetually brooding Dougal Haston, "a beatnik's idea of a Romance poet." Their ethos of anti-establishment authenticity drove them to extreme climbs in which smaller teams working with minimal gear tackled harder routes under riskier conditions. Willis narrates almost step-by-step retracings of their ascents; they dodge falling rocks, freeze and hallucinate, dangle from fraying ropes and slip heart-stoppingly into crevasses. (Some of this detail, like the reconstructions of the last thoughts of men who died on the mountain, must be imagined rather than factual.) Less compelling are the many poetic evocations of the existential mystery of climbing "a pilgrimage, an act of faith that arose from a sense of their own emptiness" which add little to the standard "Because it's there." Fortunately, the spiritual musings don't obscure the bracing immediacy of Willis's story of life spent teetering on the edge of the abyss. Photos.
