Book Review--The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest

Coburn, Broughton. The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest. Crown Publishing, New York, 2013. B/W photos, index, notes, further readings, map, 300 pages, 254 pages of text. ISBN 9780307887146, $26.

It has now been 60 years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay first climbed Mt. Everest via the South Col. It has now been 50 years since the first American set foot on the summit. In the ensuing years a near mountain of books have been written about Mt. Everest and it begs the question as to whether we really need another one. I would answer that with this being the 50 year anniversary of an American reaching the summit, the 50 year anniversary of the first ascent by the North Face and with the overall quality of the writing here the answer is YES.

For Everest aficionados there may not be a lot new here. For someone new to the literature of climbing or just picking this book up because it looks interesting there is plenty of meat on the bone. We are introduced to the main players of the 1963 American expedition in their own habitat. Many are college drop outs and most have moved west in order to feed their passion, but maybe not their stomachs as jobs were scarce, for climbing. The Tetons were home to many of the young men who ultimately would go half way around the world to attempt a climb less than a dozen men had been successful at.

We are introduced to and come to know men such as Barry Bishop, Jake Breitenbach, Barry Corbet, Norman Dyhrenfurth, Tom Hornbein, Lute Jerstad, Dick Pownall, Barry Prather, Will Siri, James Ullman, Willi Unsoeld, and Jim Whitaker amongst many others including Sherpas. Don't worry about keeping all the names straight there is a very useful "cast of characters" listing at the front of the book.

We follow along with the difficulties of raising funds, gathering supplies, planning the climb, dealing with Sherpas and other logistical nightmares. While this is a team effort, and that is repeated many times, there was infighting regarding who would go where and when and most of all there was dissension regarding the North Face route and if it should even be attempted.

The book has essentially three parts: introductions, pre-climb and preparation, the climb, and life after the climb. All three parts have value and are worth reading. They may interest different readers in different ways however. Those familiar with the story may be most interested in the later portion of the book dealing with the climbers lives after the climb. Many readers may just be interested in the climb itself however and that is more than adequately covered.

Jim Whitaker atop Mt. Everest
May 1, 1963.
Photo: Nawang Gombu/National
Geographic

The political situation of the time is always a running backdrop though out the book. The Russians were working to arm the Cubans and the Kennedy administration was having to deal with ramifications of that. Russia had also beaten the United States into space and we were playing catch up. China and India were in a tense period with the possibility of war a reality. While China had made claims to have summited the mountain in 1960 there were doubts about the truth of these claims. The Chinese were of course leery of Americans being on Everest and were concerned about spying missions or spy cameras being put in place in this pre satellite era. All of these issues helped lead to a situation that had the eyes of the world on these men. The United States did not want to shoulder another perceived failure and ultimately this group of men delivered!

And while the outcome is a positive and uplifting one there is a loneliness and sadness in the story as well. While it is true that climbers share a special bond, "the brotherhood of the rope" as Coburn says, they can be solitary men as well. Even when part of a team it is man against the mountain. It is something those of us on the outside do not completely comprehend. Also, to climb mountains is to court death. Do it for any length of time and you will look death in the eye; yours or someone close to you. Climbers know and accept that risk.

Well written and fast moving this is a book that anybody with an interest in climbing should read. If you are looking for a good adventure story or are interested in man vs. nature this is a book you should consider. Recommended!

Thanks go out to Crown for providing a complimentary review copy.

Free Books! Give-away deadline June 10, 2013

Don't forget that Random House has provided me with free copies of a couple of books to give-away to readers. Please click on the links below for further details and the press release from RH. You can also click on the photo and get further information on Amazon. I am extending the deadline until June 10, 2013 to see if anybody else is interested. All you have to do is leave a comment on the original post (not this one) with why you would like the book. Remember, the books are free just make sure I have a way to contact you!

Here is Where

A Curious Man

Here is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History BOOK GIVE-AWAY!

Thanks going out to the great folks at Random House for providing copies of two new releases AND also for providing an extra copy of each to be given away to a reader! See my second blog posting for information on the other book. The press releases are kind of long and didn't format well.

Now, if you would like a FREE copy, be sure to read the press release below and then post a comment telling me what you think you will like about this book. On June 3rd I'll take a look at the comments and choose a winner. Please make sure I have a way to contact you in order to get your address. The book is ready to send out!

A rousing cross-country journey, from small towns to big cities, in search of

America’s most extraordinary—but unmarked—historic sites

 

HERE IS WHERE:

Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History

By Andrew Carroll

 

GLOWING EARLY PRAISE FOR HERE IS WHERE:

 

“Carroll takes readers on an eye-opening and entertaining grand tour of America in this lively exploration of lesser-known or overlooked historical sites.… Part travelogue, part history, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in America’s past.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

“Carroll makes eloquent pleas for the importance of forgotten [historical] episodes.… He is a good storyteller and

has done an impressive amount of research.”

—Kirkus Reviews

 

This is a terrific book: refreshingly original, fast-paced, entertaining, and always insightful. It’s full of fun and interesting stories that bring the past to life and remind us that we are surrounded by the artifacts of history."

—Steven M. Gillon, Scholar-in-Residence at The History Channel

 

"Impressive…. Carroll has discovered a way of doing history that, once you see it, seems so obvious, indeed right under your nose or feet.  But to the best of my knowledge, no one has done this before."

—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Revolutionary Summer and Founding Brothers

 

 

The bestselling author of WAR LETTERS, Andrew Carroll, is back with a sensational new book, HERE IS WHERE: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History (Crown Archetype: May 14, 2013). The product of years of research and travel, HERE IS WHERE spotlights the unmarked locations where heroic individuals lived, groundbreaking innovations occurred, and momentous events unfolded. The book is also the cornerstone of a major campaign to identify and preserve neglected historic sites throughout the United States.

 

Carroll’s quest started as so many do: with a great story. Intrigued by a little-known account of Edwin Booth – brother of the assassin John Wilkes Booth – saving the life of Abraham Lincoln’s son at a New Jersey train station, Carroll began seeking out other forgotten but fascinating sites we walk by every day. HERE IS WHERE covers the full sweep of our nation’s past, from the first Native Americans, explorers, and pilgrims who set foot on this land, to the pioneers, patriots, inventors, and activists who transformed it.

 

Carroll visited every region of the country, and HERE IS WHERE follows his incredible trek – by car, plane, train, helicopter, kayak, bus, and bike – as he uncovers hidden history sites across America, including in:

·         Mound City, Arkansas, where a boat carrying Civil War soldiers exploded on the Mississippi River, a disaster that claimed more lives than the sinking of the Titanic (p. 34)

·         Paisley, Oregon, where the oldest human DNA in America was discovered (p. 67)

·         Saluda, Virginia, where an African-American woman refused to give up her seat on a bus, prompting a U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case—more than 11 years before Rosa Parks made her stand (p. 172)

·         Caledonia, North Carolina, where a prison inmate created a weapon, with the warden’s permission, that revolutionized modern warfare (p. 213)

·         Rigby, Idaho, where a teenage farm boy had a brainstorm that led to the invention of television (p. 238)

·         Peoria, Illinois, where a group of USDA and British scientists secretly worked to mass produce penicillin at the beginning of World War II, ultimately saving tens of millions of lives (p. 304)

·         Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where a copy of the Declaration of Independence was discovered that pre-dates the one on display at the National Archives (p. 409)

 

Timed with the publication of the book, Carroll is embarking on a 50-state, year-long tour to share his findings and energize people from all walks of life to search for great unmarked places in their own communities. Carroll is also using proceeds from his book to put up historical markers at specific sites.

 

Carroll’s previous bestseller, WAR LETTERS, inspired an ongoing nationwide effort to honor America’s troops and veterans by collecting and archiving their wartime correspondence. His love for history is genuine and deeply personal; ironically, Carroll grew up disliking the subject—until his house burned down and everything he had was destroyed. Losing all of his family memorabilia made him realize the importance of saving the past, and he’s been an impassioned and dedicated advocate for historic preservation ever since. Here Is Where is a thoroughly entertaining but profound reminder that the places we pass by often harbor astonishing secrets and that amazing, little-known stories are all around us, just waiting to be found. 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREW CARROLL is best known as the editor of WAR LETTERS, which sold more than 300,000 copies and inspired a critically acclaimed PBS documentary. His other New York Times bestsellers include LETTERS OF A NATION and BEHIND THE LINES. He also edited the anthology OPERATION HOMECOMING, which inspired the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning film of the same name. Carroll lives in Washington, D.C., and Orange, California, where he serves as the director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University.

 

HERE IS WHERE: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History

By Andrew Carroll

Published by Crown Archetype * On sale May 14, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-307-46397-5 * Price: $25.00 * Hardcover

 

Also available as an eBook and on audio from Random House

 

A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe it or Not" Ripley BOOK GIVE-AWAY!

Thanks going out to the great folks at Random House for providing copies of two new releases AND also for providing an extra copy of each to be given away to a reader! See my second blog posting for information on the other book. The press releases are kind of long and didn't format well.

Now, if you would like a FREE copy, be sure to read the press release below and then post a comment telling me what you think you will like about this book. On June 3rd I'll take a look at the comments and choose a winner. Please make sure I have a way to contact you in order to get your address. The book is ready to send out!

The first ever complete biography of “Believe It or Not!”
creator Robert Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned
globe-trottingplayboy millionaire, who achieved global
 celebrity by documenting and celebrating the world’s
strangest oddities.

 

A CURIOUS MAN

The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley

By Neal Thompson

 

 

“Robert Ripley was as unique and fascinating as the ‘Believe It or Not’ newspaper feature that made him

one of the most popular and widely read syndicated cartoonists in the country during the 1930s, and

Thompson delivers an equally fascinating biography that captures the influence of Ripley’s work life then

and now, well into the age of television and the Internet ….Thompson superbly shows how Ripley’s work

 is the basis for today’s more extreme reality shows by teaching readers ‘to gape with respect at the

weirdness of man and nature.’” —Publishers Weekly

 

“Thompson paints a picture of Ripley as a brilliant but aggressively eccentric man, a globe-trotting curiosity

 seeker who always believed there was something even more unusual just around the corner. A Curious Man

 is a fine introduction to a man who, for most of us, has been merely the name above a famous title.” —Booklist

 

“What’s truly unbelievable is that it’s taken us so long to get a full-fledged biography of this great American

 character, a man who tapped into our fascination with bizarre non-fiction and who can rightly claim to be

 the godfather of Reality TV. It was worth the wait.”—A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling

 author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically

 

“Anyone who wants to understand America needs to read this book.”—Ben Fountain, Winner of the

 Pen/Hemingway Award and author of the National Book Award Finalist Billy Lynn’s Long

Halftime Walk

 

 “Turning the phrase ‘believe it or not’ into a global brand and multimedia empire built on equal doses o

f sex, information, and oddity, Robert Ripley played a fascinating role in the rise of modern American entertainment….Shrewdly, he conjured a first-person fairy tale for the modern age, helping millions to

 forget the specter of world war and depression.  Now, for the first time anywhere, Thompson brings us

 Ripley in all his gaudy glory, crafting a hardboiled Horatio Alger story for a media-obsessed age.”

—Tom Reiss, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Black Count 

 

 “Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the history of a time can be resolved in the biography of a few

 stout and earnest people.  Robert Ripley was certainly one of those and, in this fascinating account,

Thompson rescues for us a colorful slice of history.”—Colum McCann, bestselling author of

Let the Great World Spin

 

“A Curious Man is the rollicking, terrific story of one of America’s greatest men. … Thompson tells

the story with a perfectly-pitched sense of what makes such a man, and a nation, tick.  I laughed and

cried.  I became convinced that the next slot on Mount Rushmore should go to Robert ‘Rip’ Ripley.”

—Peter Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Dog Stars

 

“A Curious Man is a work of real beauty and fun and emotion—and intense readability. It is a

single-session book, one of those that takes your clock and renders it mute until the book has had

 its say. Thompson is the genuine article: smart and witty, empathetic and a pleasure to read.”

—Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng

 

 

Howard Hughes crossed with P.T. Barnum, Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley was a lonely, buck-toothed

 cartoonist turned eccentric millionaire and renowned world-traveler who in the 1930’s and 1940’s earned

 international fame by journeying to the farthest corners of the earth in search of the world’s most exotic

 curiosities. But for all his success in uncovering oddities, no piece of Ripley’s collection was as remarkable

 as the man himself. From his youth as an awkward young artist with an innate empathy for “freaks,”

to his golden years spent on a private island stocked with rare artifacts and strange pets, Ripley lived life on

 the kind of grand scale normally confined to fiction. Now with A Curious Man: The Strange and

 Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley (Crown Archetype; May 7, 2013) acclaimed

biographer Neal Thompson has delivered a marvelously compelling account of this great American story,

 told for the first time ever—a thrilling tale of the underdog who taught us to believe in the unbelievable. 

 

A the height of his success, Ripley was one of the most widely-read and influential syndicated cartoonists

 of his day, one of the highest-paid newspaper men of his generation, and among the best-traveled men

in history, a man whose global dispatches gave readers much-needed entertainment during the depths

 of the Depression. As a media pioneer, he played a significant role in the evolution of newspapers, radio

 and television that were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness—a taste for the

titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, dumbest, and most weird. Today, that can

 be seen in reality TV, YouTube, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, MythBusters and a host of

 other pop-culture phenomena.

 

In the end, the supreme irony of Ripley’s life, which was dedicated to exalting the unusual, is that he may

 have been the most amazing oddity of all.

 

#     #     #

 

About the Author

NEAL THOMPSON is the critically acclaimed author of Light This Candle, Driving with the Devil,

and Hurricane Season and has contributed to such publications as Outside, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated.

 He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.  You can find him at www.nealthompson.com.

Upcoming Posts--Bruce Levine and North Carolina fiction

A couple of new releases have arrived in my mailbox over the last few weeks.

Thanks to the good folks at Random House for sending a copy of Bruce Levine's new book The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

From the dust jacket:  In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.

After seeing the "reviews" on Amazon this looks like it will be an interesting book. Those who refuse to accept that slavery was the driving force in the cause of the war seem to have taken it upon themselves to post a bunch of 1 star reviews with little real thought or insight.


Thanks go out to author David C. Reavis for sending along a nicely autographed copy of Upon These Steps: Brothers in NC 23rd Regiment.

From the book cover: Two brothers are faced with whether or not to join the Confederate Army. One decides to voluntarily enlist, while the other joins only after being drafted. The brothers’ episodes reflect the chronicles of the “Granville Rifles,” a Company within the NC 23rd Regiment. From the Battle of Bull Run to Sherman’s occupation of Raleigh, the plight of each boy gives the reader an insider’s glimpse of the war. Left behind on the family farm are their parents and siblings. Relive what a Southern family had to endure during the war years. All major events seem to originate on the home’s unique circular rock steps. Soldiers leave for and return from war, slaves are freed, Yankees pay a visit, and suitors come a calling. The epic story of this Southern family is a unique blending of historical fiction with a storyline that reflects the resilience of the human spirit. The book is the result of over 35 years of genealogy research of the author. All characters are based on actual people living during the Civil War, with many events being based on eyewitness accounts as recorded by the soldiers in letters written home.

Mr. Reavis is retired from the State of North Carolina and has been doing genealogy research for over 35 years. Please be sure to see his websites www.reavishistory.com and www.uponthesesteps.com . Theres is also a Facebook page for the book here.