From the Bookshelf: Into the Silence
I might not have got it without the unfortunate spur of the closest bookstore closing, but I had taken some interest in Wade Davis's book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest before that. While I didn't have many books on mountain climbing beforehand, I do have a general interest in "tales of exploration and adventure"... although that previous reading might have left me wondering a little just what sort of tale would be told. "British explorers," at least when it comes to the polar regions, get summed up and dismissed as too taken with their senses of superiority to use equipment and strategies that would actually work, and were doomed as a result to failure if not death. (With something of a weakness, perhaps, for "counter-counterarguments," I've taken notice of a few challenges to that conventional wisdom, though.)
As it turned out, though, the first part of the subtitle may have given Wade Davis a larger target what with marching into machine gun fire and generals safely behind the front lines. Still, in presenting the effects of the First World War on the first climbers to attempt Mount Everest, how they thought in terms of campaigns and saw the desolation they were pressing up into in terms of battlefields, it seemed in the end to add to the book. It was pointed out how climbers who could have been helpful were left out of the expeditions more or less through not being able to play well in the British class structure, but the successes and accomplishments along the way were also pointed out. At times, I thought the emphasis was on the first journeys through Tibet just to get to the mountain; the book explains how the British managed to more or less destroy Tibet's army on first pushing their way into the country in colonial days, but the really crucial problem between the nations that pointed to the Chinese takeover seemed to have been something else altogether in the end.
In some odd way, one of the things I wondered about the book the most was how its picture section seemed to be jumbled up by date. It did, though, make me take notice of another book about climbing Mount Everest (this one covering more history) in a remaindered bookstore; it happened to recall some of the same anecdotes, but perhaps not in as much detail.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/160055.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
As it turned out, though, the first part of the subtitle may have given Wade Davis a larger target what with marching into machine gun fire and generals safely behind the front lines. Still, in presenting the effects of the First World War on the first climbers to attempt Mount Everest, how they thought in terms of campaigns and saw the desolation they were pressing up into in terms of battlefields, it seemed in the end to add to the book. It was pointed out how climbers who could have been helpful were left out of the expeditions more or less through not being able to play well in the British class structure, but the successes and accomplishments along the way were also pointed out. At times, I thought the emphasis was on the first journeys through Tibet just to get to the mountain; the book explains how the British managed to more or less destroy Tibet's army on first pushing their way into the country in colonial days, but the really crucial problem between the nations that pointed to the Chinese takeover seemed to have been something else altogether in the end.
In some odd way, one of the things I wondered about the book the most was how its picture section seemed to be jumbled up by date. It did, though, make me take notice of another book about climbing Mount Everest (this one covering more history) in a remaindered bookstore; it happened to recall some of the same anecdotes, but perhaps not in as much detail.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/160055.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.