The Mammoth Book of Climbing Adventures (Mammoth Books)

In the spirit of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb, The Mammoth Book of Climbing Adventures takes the reader into the oxygen-scarce zones of extreme mountaineering. Presenting twenty firsthand accounts of climbs on the great peaks and ‘big walls' of five continents, from the "new alpinism" of the 1930s to the present, this collection explores the furthest reaches of human daring and endurance. Prolific editor Jon E. Lewis assembles a who's who of mountaineering's most intrepid heroes, including Sir Edmund Hillary, Fritz Bechtold, and Ed Drummond, among others. There are the examples of Sebastian Snow, who scaled the twin summits of Ecuador's remotest mountain range, and Eric Shipton, who lived out his old age climbing Patagonia's peaks. There are also such accounts of courage and catastrophe as Reinhold Messner's successful scaling of Nana Parbat and the loss of his brother in an avalanche on the descent, Walter Bonatti's tragic attempt on Mont Blanc that forced him to leave half his party dead in the snow, and Jack Longland's terrifying ordeal of being trapped in a blizzard on Everest. And in one of climbing's epics of perseverance and peril, Maurice Herzog describes his unstoppable ascent of Annapurna and the ordeal of his disaster-plagued return—in a testament he had to dictate after frostbite had claimed his fingers.