'Chris Bonington's Everest' focuses on his first-hand accounts of three major attempts on the world's highest mountain with some great photos thrown in.
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Chris Bonington's
Everest
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Price:
£20.00
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Weight: 1206 grammes
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Features:
Hardback, 256 pages, published by Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
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Lots of jaw-dropping photos plus the weight of history
courtesy of an original protagonist
The writing is more sturdy and workmanline than
brilliant though still very readable
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The inspiration for a thousand teenage postcards home from Snowdonia
complaining about porters revolting and the parlous quality of
chapatis in Llanberis, Chris Bonington's been churning out the
expedition books for at least the last 200 years, or at least that's
how it seems. In fact he's now written a whopping 15 of
them.
His latest, conveniently out just in time for Christmas and the
50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, is a timely
reworking of his three major trips to Everest - the first ascent of
the South West Face, the tragic attempt on the North East Ridge and,
finally, his own successful ascent of the mountain via the South East
Ridge in 1985.
Bonington's prose doesn't have the pyrotechnic glow of say, a Joe
Simpson or Andrew Greig, but it's always extremely readable and the
intercutting of extracts from the diaries of other mountaineers
including Scott, Haston and Boardman adds variety and first hand
excitement from higher up the mountain.
But then you don't read Bonington for the quality of the writing,
more because of his personal involvement in some of the most famous
events in British Himalayan mountaineering history. The undramatic
prose belies the tension of the events he describes - Haston and
Scott's bivouac high on Everest after completing the SW face route,
the disappearance of Mick Burke on the same expedition and, saddest
of all, the deaths of Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker high on the North
East ridge.
'We had only the memory of that tiny figure silhouetted against
the sky and then disappearing from sight behind the second pinnacle,'
he writes after the discovery of Boardman's body. The terse prose
drawing a telescope's picture of the event.
After that, he promised his wife Wendy that he would never return
to Everest, but in 1985 he was tempted back by Norwegian shipping
magnate Arne Naess and the chance to summit the mountain with oxygen
and full Sherpa support via the normal South Col route, becoming -
with the encouragement of an imagined Doug Scott at the Hillary Step
- the seventh Briton to climb the mountain.
'Standing on that highest point of earth had meant a great deal',
he writes. ' Gratification of ego? Without a doubt. But it was so
much more than that, though I still find it difficult to define
exactly what that drive was ... It was a focal point in a climbing
life.'
He finishes with a few, almost inevitable, observations on the
commercialisation of Everest, mentioning in passing that he, himself,
wouldn't have summited without supplemental oxygen.
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Verdict: We were worried that this
might turn out to be a dull, lifeless, coffee table-style
tome, but the mix of readable prose, dramatic events and
loads of pictures both of the mountain and the protagonists
make it a surprisingly gripping read. Bonington's terribly
British, with no overt soul-searching or hand-wringing, but
the excitement of tilting three times at the world's highest
mountain is always underlined with a quiet sadness at
friends lost in action. Well worth a read, particularly if
you missed his original books - Everest The Hard Way and
Everest The Unclimbed Ridge - and a good gift for Everest
freaks everywhere.
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Pushed for time:
Book about Everest with lots of pictures. Surprisingly
good read.
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