The Vast Unknown

April 1, 2013
A sweeping account of the first American visitors to Mount Everest's peak. Coburn (Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman, 2000, etc.) delivers an atmospheric retelling of that monumental inaugural climb in May 1963, providing a companion to his stunning 1997 pictorial, Everest: Mountain Without Mercy. In the early 1960s, there was great pressure on these brave "hybrid scientist-adventurers" to boost American morale with a daring feat of collective strength after such a dark decade shrouded in war, a failed Cuban territorial invasion and Soviet space rivalries. A chance meeting between Willi Unsoeld, a grizzly mountain guide, and young Pacific Northwest climbers Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach while scaling Wyoming's Grand Teton range in the early '60s forged the beginnings of an American Everest team of climbing parties led by Norman Dyhrenfurth, a veteran Swiss-American mountaineer. Eventually, 21 hand-selected members of the expedition (glaciologists, radio operators, historians, cinematographers, etc., along with numerous ancillaries) ascended the mountain's treacherous terrain, battling bone-crushing injuries, oxygen deprivation, weather extremes and "house-sized" blocks of ice collapsing in their paths. Though Corbet's faith in the team's success floundered, the steely determination of the other members kept hope alive. Culled from "Expedition Newsletters" and interviews with the seven surviving expedition members, Coburn's unhurried, character-driven narrative pays scrupulous attention to the climb's every detail and to Everest's majestic natural history. The author's contemporary coda features a visit with the nonagenarian Dyhrenfurth, who wryly comments that mountaineering on Everest has gone terribly modern and that simply "coughing up $50,000" can afford a reasonably fit person a secure, guided trek to the summit. An exhilarating slice of American adventure-sporting history.

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April 15, 2013

Coburn (Everest: Mountain Without Mercy) presents a compelling history of the expedition that reached Everest's summit almost ten years after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's pioneering ascent. Coburn describes the motivation behind the expedition as a quest to realize the American Dream. Norman Dyhrenfurth assembled a team of excellent climbers and capable glaciologists, as well as scientists who conducted psychological and sociological research on the team (how human behavior is impacted by isolated conditions; the implications for long space missions). The Americans were ultimately successful, summitting six climbers and with two men completing the first traverse of Everest by a new route on the West Ridge. While fundraising for the expedition, Dyhrenfurth had proposed that a weather station could be installed on Everest's summit. The U.S. government wasn't interested in the weather but was interested in monitoring a Chinese nuclear test facility just north of the Himalayas. American Everest veterans Barry Bishop, Lute Jerstad, Dave Dingman, Barry Prather, and Barry Corbet participated in installing sensors on Nanda Devi (unsuccessfully) and later Nanda Kot, which provided invaluable data for years. VERDICT Coburn brings this exciting chapter of American mountaineering history to life and will satisfy readers of adventure and mountaineering literature.--Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Lib., IN

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2013
Although it had been summited several times already, Mount Everest was still virgin territory to American climbers in 1963. But it was more than a mountain that must be conquered. It was a symbol. At the time, JFK had announced his dedication to winning the space race, but the Russians were in the lead. Seeing a way to give Americans a shot of confidence, a group of mountaineers vowed to get to the top of Everest. This gripping account follows the climbers on their mission. In many ways, it's a typical climbing book (danger, bravery, excitement, triumph), but it's Coburn's perspective that makes it unusual. Likening a mountain-climbing expedition to a space mission is clever and apt, Everest being completely unknown, nearly as daunting and potentially deadly as outer space. (Coburn notes that, while one of the climbers was writing in his diary from 25,000 feet up the mountain, astronaut Gordon Cooper, in his first flight into space, was passing a mere 100 miles overhead.) Not just another book about mountain climbing, this is also a story of America in the early 1960s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)