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The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Knopf
October 2011
On Sale: October 18, 2011
672 pages ISBN: 0375408894 EAN: 9780375408892 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 Mount
Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was
Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford
scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering
experience. Neither of them returned.
In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on
more than a decade of prodigious research in British,
Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in
Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British
climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early
1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis
recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow
climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous
terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their
remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context:
Davis shows how the exploration originated in
nineteenth-century imperial ambitions, and he takes us far
beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where
Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world
utterly shattered. In the wake of the war that destroyed
all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions,
led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol
of national redemption and hope.
Beautifully written and rich with detail, Into the Silence
is a classic account of exploration and endurance, and a
timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of
adventurers, soldiers, and mountaineers the likes of which
we will never see again.
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