Overview

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. From the Hardcover edition.

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9780307944122

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Reviews

<p> Davis's book, ten years in the writing, is highly absorbing narrative . . . A heroic attempt to capture the scale of the undertaking to conquer the highest mountain on earth. <br>--Michael Jeffries, The Newark Star-Ledger <br> A magnificent, audacious venture . . . Into the Silence is quite unlike any other mountaineering book. It not only spins a gripping Boy's Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redemption at the top of the world. Many of those Himalayan explorers, including Mallory, had served in the corpse-ridden fields of northern France. Indeed, of the 26 men who climbed in the three expeditions, 20 had seen front-line action. Six had been severely wounded, two others hospitalized by disease at the front, and one treated for shell shock. All had seen dozens of friends and countrymen die. For these veterans, the author argues, death had lost its power . . . At its heart, Into the Silence is an elegy for a lost generation. <br>--Ed Caesar, The Sunday Times (Front cover) <br> A gripper of a read . . . Silence revives the cliff's-edge drama of those Jazz age climbs and drives home the tragedy of Mallory's death. <br>--Bruce Barcott, Outside <br> The men in this story had, for the most part, been young in 1914, bright and energetic and full of dreams. By 1918 those who had survived had seen and done things that no one should have to know about, and Davis does a magnificent job detailing their experiences, setting up the rest of the story--the expeditionary saga--as a logical response, even an inspired rejoinder to the soul-destroying realities of war. . . it is perhaps the book's signature achievement that [Davis] keeps the narrative zipping along toward its inexorable and tragic conclusion while so thoroughly and persuasively contextualizing key events. <br>--Christina Thompson, The Boston Globe <br> This profoundly ambitious book aims hig

Davis's book, ten years in the writing, is highly absorbing narrative . . . A heroic attempt to capture the scale of the undertaking to conquer the highest mountain on earth. --Michael Jeffries, The Newark Star-Ledger A magnificent, audacious venture . . . Into the Silence is quite unlike any other mountaineering book. It not only spins a gripping Boy's Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redemption at the top of the world. Many of those Himalayan explorers, including Mallory, had served in the corpse-ridden fields of northern France. Indeed, of the 26 men who climbed in the three expeditions, 20 had seen front-line action. Six had been severely wounded, two others hospitalized by disease at the front, and one treated for shell shock. All had seen dozens of friends and countrymen die. For these veterans, the author argues, death had lost its power . . . At its heart, Into the Silence is an elegy for a lost generation. --Ed Caesar, The Sunday Times (Front cover) A gripper of a read . . . Silence revives the cliff's-edge drama of those Jazz age climbs and drives home the tragedy of Mallory's death. --Bruce Barcott, Outside The men in this story had, for the most part, been young in 1914, bright and energetic and full of dreams. By 1918 those who had survived had seen and done things that no one should have to know about, and Davis does a magnificent job detailing their experiences, setting up the rest of the story--the expeditionary saga--as a logical response, even an inspired rejoinder to the soul-destroying realities of war. . . it is perhaps the book's signature achievement that [Davis] keeps the narrative zipping along toward its inexorable and tragic conclusion while so thoroughly and persuasively contextualizing key events. --Christina Thompson, The Boston Globe This profoundly ambitious book aims hig

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