Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
Wade Davis
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
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 killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. In this book 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.'
4.3 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
672 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1847921840 |
| Publisher |
Bodley Head |
| |
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 killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. In this book 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.'
Reviews
The Observer
Geoff Dyer
“Magnificent … Into the Silence offers a meticulous recreation of how the idea of climbing the mountain grows out of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India (which leads to the naming of Everest and establishes that it is indeed the highest point on earth); the full diplomatic and political wranglings necessary even to make a start; and the immense logistical demands of such attempts once they are under way: third time around, the supplies include "60 tins of quail in foie gras and 48 bottles of champagne, Montebello 1915". Still more impressive is the way Davis depicts the meeting of incompatible belief systems.”
25/09/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Jan Morris
“[An] impressive book … The writing is not sparkling, the methods can be confusing, and there is not actually much in the book that will be new to Everest aficionados. Its intentions, though, are terrific, so that although ostensibly it examines in such detail only a few years of the Everest story, in a way it tells it all. And to my mind, it tells us most about the spiritual effect of the great mountain, filtered as it was in those days through the horrific mesh of war.”
25/09/2011
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The Sunday Times
Ed Caesar
“Davis, a Canadian anthropologist and adventurer, spent 10 years researching this book, and it shows. Sometimes his reading threatens to drown the story ... But, mostly, his painstaking library work has a benevolent effect. Indeed, he has an eye for detail that allows him to develop what might have been monochrome episodes into glowing colour, and brings minor characters into bloom.”
25/09/2011
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