Into the Silence The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest [Paperback]

The definitive story of the British adventurers who survived the trenches of World War I and went on to risk their lives climbing Mount Everest.
 
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
 
Drawing on more than a decade of prodigious research, bestselling author and explorer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their significant achievements in sweeping historical context: from Britain’s nineteen-century imperial ambitions to the war that shaped Mallory’s generation. Theirs was a country broken, and the Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national redemption and hope. In Davis’s rich exploration, he creates a timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary times.

Praise forInto the Silence:

A kaleidoscopic account. . . . Ambitious. . . . Entertaining. . . . Extraordinary.
—The Wall Street Journal
  
Brilliantly engrossing. . . . An instant classic of mountaineering literature.
—The Guardian (London)
  
Magnificent. . . . Davis tells the full story behind this almost mythic story, imbuing it with historic scope and epic sweep.
—Los Angeles Times
 
A masterpiece standing atop its own world, along with the classicInto Thin Airby Jon Krakauer.
—Salt Lake City Tribune

Into the Silenceis quite unlike any other mountaineering book. It not only spins a gripping Boy’s Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redel8