Product Description

"The Boys of Everest" tells the story of a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest's first ascent. It is a story of tremendous courage, astonishing achievement and heart- breaking loss. Their leader was the boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington. His inner circle - they came to be known as Bonington's Boys - included a dozen who became climbing's greatest generation. Bonington's Boys gave birth to a new brand of climbing. They took increasingly terrible risks on now-legendary expeditions to the world's most fearsome peaks. And they paid an enormous price for their achievements. Most of Bonington's boys died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: Was it worth it?"The Boys Of Everest", based on interviews with surviving climbers and other individuals as well as five decades of journals, expedition accounts, and letters, provides the closest thing to an answer that we'll ever have. It offers riveting descriptions of what The Boys Of Everest found in the mountains - as well as an understanding of what they lost there.This is the first, and only, book to span the history of the legendary climbers who changed mountaineering. Chris Bonington, the world's most famous climber, cooperated with research. Clint Willis has edited two very successful climbing anthologies. It is a landmark book that captures the intense risk and elation of mountaineering.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33783 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

About the Author
Clint Willis has written hundreds of articles for publications such as Men's Journal, Outside and The New York Times. His work has been nominated for the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine Award. Clint's books include more than 40 anthologies on topics that include adventure, politics, religion and war.

Customer Reviews

It's not all about Bonnington
Much of the premise of this book is that Chris Bonnington somehow managed to gather around him an inner circle of daring and quite frankly sometimes madly over-ambitious climbers, many/most of whom were to meet grim deaths amongst the mountains of the world. I personally think that there was a coincidental aspect to this in that just as international travel became easier, technology was developed which allowed mountaineers to push themselves to further and further limits. Couple all this with an ever burgeoning media and the opening up of sponsorship possibilities which is arguably the main thing that Bonnington brought to the table in that he was able to meld these two things together which meant that he was able to head up large scale expeditions to unclimbed mountains and routes so naturally any ambitious climber would try and get on to a Bonnington mission as that was often the only way to get onto some of these mountains.

One thing that comes across in this brilliantly executed book is the mixture of guilt, pride and sheer love of the high mountains that comes across from Bonnington and those he climbed with. By his own admission he wasn't the greatest climber but was an excellent organiser which allowed the "boys" the opportunities to make audacious climbs that would have been unheard of in the decades earlier. It would appear that few of the climbers described here perhaps over reached their abilities, or took too many chances with conditions through ambition to outdo their peers more that they were constantly measuring themselves against the mountain. His writing and film making arguably made stars of the likes of Dougal Haston, Doug Scott and the like, and of course they went into print very succesfully as well.

there is a wealth of literature about the mountains and Bonnington's fascination with them comes across well in this book, but even more so it describes the serendipitous coming together of the disparate elements described above to bring about a golden age of not just climbing, but also the description of such climbing through print and film.

A curate's egg
The idea behind this book is great - link together the British (and other climbers) who climbed with Bonnington. Something to compare and contrast with Bonnington's work and written from an outsider's perspective rather than like Boardman and Tasker or Venables et al in the first person.

What really grates is the number of typos in the book - the editor should have done a more thorough job - it first i thought that they were americanisms but in the end they were typos - no more no less.

The 'Boys' Done Well
I found this book very compelling but at the same time was slightly uneasy about a much used device that Willis employs where the boundaries between fact and fiction become a bit blurred.
What I'm referring to is telling the story of a climbers death (eg Mick Burke pp281-283} as he might have experienced it, told by an omniscient presence travelling with him as he meets his death. The writing is good in these sections, as in the rest of the book and I became a bit more comfortable with it once I had thought about what he was doing. It was the initial realisation I suppose, that in these passages he was writing, apparently with authority, about something that only the deceased could have known about.

As editor of a Climbing Journal I get many review books sent
to me - I read very few of them cover to cover on the first day - This was one of them.