The Second Death of George Mallory: The Enigma and Spirit of Mount Everest

The legendary mountain climber chronicles the adventures of two of his predecessors, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, and their tragic efforts to scale Mount Everest in 1924. 15,000 first printing.

The author has had a lifelong obsession with George Mallory's three attempts to, in his hero's own words, "catch the summit by surprise" in 1921, 1922 and on the 1924 quest from which he never returned. In this homage, Messner (My Quest for the Yeti) draws from Mallory's own journal entries to relive those three expeditions, fleshing them out for the reader with his own heroic experiences in climbing Everest. Avid mountaineers will be especially intrigued by the step-by-step detail Messner shares, enabling his readers to see the mountain as Mallory did. What is even more important to Messner is to celebrate Mallory's legacy and "the disappearance of the spirit of amateurism that drove him." Although he believes that Mallory never reached Everest's summit, Messner is adamant that all who came after this pioneer owe him a great debt. Employing Mallory's spirit, the author recounts subsequent expeditions, imagining what Mallory would say about each: the 1933 trip by Wager and Harris, who found an ice ax that could have been left behind only by Mallory or his colleague Irvine nine years before; Hillary and Tensing's triumphant climb in 1953; the expedition sponsored by the Chinese government in 1960 and the subsequent trek in 1975, which was the first time that "artificial climbing aids" (in contrast to Mallory's tweed jacket, hobnailed boots and a book by Keats) were used and have been so ever since; and, finally, the 1999 expedition during which Mallory's remains were found and ceremoniously buried. This tribute will resonate most strongly with veteran climbers, but even armchair enthusiasts will be gripped by Messner's seductive and uplifting narrative. 30 b&w photos; 6 maps.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

One of mountaineering's greatest unsolved mysteries is the question of whether George Mallory, who died with Andrew Irvine on Mount Everest in 1924, reached the summit of the mountain. The author, a noted German climber (he was the first to scale Everest without bottled oxygen), believes he did not, but he also argues that the issue of reaching the summit is not the point of the Mallory story. The point, he contends, is that the "because-it's-there" spirit of amateur climbing died on the mountain with Mallory. Mountain climbing is now, with increasingly rare exceptions, a corporate adventure, with sponsors and elaborate funding and state-of-the-art equipment. When Mallory made his 1924 summit attempt, he did it with equipment that seems almost prehistoric. Messner effectively incorporates excerpts from Mallory's journals in his account, but he also includes some disconcerting passages apparently intended to represent beyond-the-grave commentary by the long-dead climber. That misstep aside, this is an utterly engrossing portrait of a climber and a spirit no longer with us. David Pitt
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Legendary Italian climber Messner (My Quest for the Yeti, LJ 5/1/00), whose accomplishments include being the first to climb Mount Everest without bottled oxygen and the first to climb all 14 of the world's peaks over 8000 meters, attempts to trace what he considers the loss of the spirit of amateur adventure in mountaineering. The author quotes Mallory and his contemporaries and reconstructs Mallory's succession of expeditions to Everest from 1922 to 1924 through evidence found via the 1999 discovery of Mallory's body. This approach is useful for understanding the changes in motivation and attitudes toward climbing over the years. It gets a bit odd, however, when Messner attempts to comment on the current state of affairs by using Mallory's imagined voice, rendered in italics. All told, however, this is an interesting take on the evolution of climbing, adding perspective to the body of works on Mallory and the unsolved question of the circumstances surrounding his death. With its useful bibliography and 30 black-and-white photos, this would be a good acquisition, after David Breashears's Last Climb (National Geographic, 1999), especially for larger public libraries and those with extensive mountaineering/adventure collections. Tim Markus, Evergreen State Coll. Lib., Olympia, WA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.