Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest - Softcover

Davis, Wade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375708154 ISBN 13: 9780375708152

Publisher: Vintage, 2012

Synopsis

The definitive story of the British adventurers who survived the trenches of World War I and went on to risk their lives climbing Mount Everest.
 
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
 
Drawing on more than a decade of prodigious research, bestselling author and explorer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their significant achievements in sweeping historical context: from Britain’s nineteen-century imperial ambitions to the war that shaped Mallory’s generation. Theirs was a country broken, and the Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national redemption and hope. In Davis’s rich exploration, he creates a timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary times.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: It’s tempting to call Wade Davis’s magnificent Into the Silence an Everest of a book. But that would be misleading. It is more like K2: challenging, technically complex, and hugely rewarding upon completion. The book starts off not with mountaineering, but with vivid, novelistic descriptions of the horrors of the First World War. Years of waste and destruction in the trenches, Davis argues, “led a desperate nation to embrace the assault on Everest as a gesture of imperial redemption.” Those who endured attempts on the summit all bore the scars of the Great War—and they were drawn to the mountain by an almost contradictory desire for conquest and spiritual ablution. At the center of it all is Mallory, whose eventual disappearance effectively closed that chapter in mountaineering. His utterance “because it’s there” became a new war cry, but he climbed for deeper reasons entirely. -- Chris Schluep

About the Author:

Wade Davis is the bestselling author of fifteen books, including Into the Silence, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and One River, and is an award-winning anthropologist, ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. He currently holds the post of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and has been named by the National Geographic Society as one of the Explorers for the Millennium. His work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, and all over the world, but he spends most of his time between Washington, D.C., and northern British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0375708154
• ISBN 13: 9780375708152
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688