Brotherhood of the Rope: The Biography of Charles Houston - Softcover

McDonald, Bernadette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442968044 ISBN 13: 9781442968042

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant, 2012

Synopsis

The biography of Charles Houston, M.D., famed for leading the heroic K2 expedition of 1953 and his pioneering research in high-altitude medicine. In Brotherhood of the rope, Bernadette McDonald traces the development of an American hero. Houston is a mountaineer whose groundbreaking medical experiments on altitude and the human body helped calibrate the nation's WWII air-assault strategy and shorten the war. This is the man personally recruited by Sergeant Shriver to lead the first Peace Corps programs in India; the friend who Bill Moyers credits with saving his life; the physician who built some of the first artificial-heart prototypes in his garage. Houston is still a leading authority in high-altitude medicine, and serves as a mentor for troubled teens.

About this title

About the Author:

Bernadette McDonald is former Vice President of Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre, where she directed the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and was a founder of the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Bernadette is the co-editor of ''Voices From the Summit: The World's Great Mountaineers on the Future of Climbing,''published by National Geographic, and the editor of ''Extreme Landscape,''released in 2002, and co-editor of ''Whose Water Is It,'' released in 2003.

From Publishers Weekly:

Charles Houston, author of mountaineering classic K2: The Savage Mountain and now in his nineties, was plagued with feelings of failure even as he excelled in a number of daunting roles: medical doctor, university professor, Peace Corps director and legendary mountain climber. This novel-like biography explores the complicated man behind the myth, from his privileged upbringing through almost a century of adventure and achievement. A man of big ideas and big ambitions, Houston began experimenting in 1946 with altitude chambers, developing the first method for inoculating against hypoxia, in order to conquer Everest. Ten years later he was building, in his garage, the first "crude designs" for the artificial heart. There are fascinating asides into Houston's "bouillabaisse" of careers, including work for the U.S. Army, medical practices in Exeter and Aspen, and his reluctant stint as a Peace Corps director in India, an eventful tenure. Author and climber McDonald (I'll Call You in Kathmandu) deepens Houston's legacy by providing a view of his inner struggles with depression, revealing this larger-than-life figure in very human terms, making Houston a pleasure to spend time with; as one of hiss fellow climbers would say of Houston, years later, "his accomplishments are nothing compared the greatness of his soul."
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About this edition

• Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1442968044
• ISBN 13: 9781442968042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448