Everest; Mountain Without Mercy

Washington DC: National Geographic, 1997. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. The format is approximately by 9.5 inches by 12.25 inches. 256 pages. This is a heavy book and if sent outside of the United States would require an additional shipping payment. Introduction by Tim Cahill. Illustrations (most in color). Afterword by David Breashears with spectacular Imax camera images from the motion picture Everest. More than 125 full-color photographs, including spectacular IMAX images, and firsthand accounts by survivors chronicle the fateful 1996 expedition to climb Everest, a trek that ended up claiming eight lives Broughton (Brot) Coburn graduated from Harvard College in 1973, and for two of the past four decades he has lived in the Himalaya of Nepal, Tibet and India, writing and overseeing development and environmental conservation efforts for the World Bank, UNESCO, UNDP, World Wildlife Fund and other agencies. He has written or edited nine books, including two national bestsellers, and won several awards. In September of 2015, National Geographic Books re-released a new edition of Everest: Mountain Without Mercy, their second-biggest selling book of all time. Tim Cahill (born 1944) is a travel writer who lives in Livingston, Montana, United States. David Finlay Breashears (born December 20, 1955) is an American mountaineer, filmmaker, author, and speaker. In 1985, he reached the summit of Mount Everest a second time, becoming the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest more than once. He is best known as the director and cinematographer of Everest (1998) and for his assistance in the rescue efforts during the 1996 Everest disaster. The 1996 Mount Everest disaster occurred on 10-11 May 1996 when eight climbers caught in a blizzard died on Mount Everest while attempting to descend from the summit. Over the entire season, 12 people died trying to reach the summit, making it the deadliest season on Mount Everest at the time and the third deadliest after the 22 fatalities resulting from avalanches caused by the April 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 16 fatalities of the 2014 Mount Everest avalanche. The 1996 disaster received widespread publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest. Numerous climbers were at a high altitude on Everest during the storm including the Adventure Consultants team, led by Rob Hall, and the Mountain Madness team, led by Scott Fischer. While climbers died on both the North Face and South Col approaches, the events on the latter were more widely reported. Four members of the Adventure Consultants expedition died, including Hall, while Fischer was the sole casualty of the Mountain Madness expedition. Three officers of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police also died. Following the disaster, several survivors wrote memoirs. Journalist Jon Krakauer, on assignment from Outside magazine and on the Adventure Consultants team, published Into Thin Air (1997) which became a bestseller. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide in the Mountain Madness team, felt impugned by the book and co-authored a rebuttal called The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (1997). Beck Weathers, of Hall's expedition, and Lene Gammelgaard, of Fischer's expedition, wrote about their experiences in their respective books, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest (2000) and Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy (2000). In 2014, Lou Kasischke, also of Hall's expedition, published his own account in After the Wind: 1996 Everest Tragedy, One Survivor's Story. In addition to the members of the Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness teams, Mike Trueman, who coordinated the rescue from Base Camp, contributed The Storms: Adventure and Tragedy on Everest (2015). Graham Ratcliffe, who climbed to the South Col of Everest on 10 May, noted in A Day to Die For (2011) that weather reports forecasting a major storm developing after 8 May and peaking in intensity on 11 May were delivered to expedition leaders. Hall and Fischer received these before their planned summit attempts on 10 May. Some of their teams summited Everest during an apparent break in this developing storm only to descend into the full force of it late on 10 May.