From Outside Magazine:
Bonatti speaks! Enigmatic Italian climber Walter Bonatti embraces the English written word for the first time in a quarter-century to claim his due as one of history's greatest mountaineers—and to put one of climbing's most enduring controversies to rest.
From 1961 to 1996 Bonatti wrote nine climbing books in Italian. But upon reading what he felt were the butchered English versions, he refused to authorize any further translations. Only when Robert Marshall, an Australian surgeon and climber, wrote an investigative article in 1994 about the controversial 1954 first ascent of K2 did the Italian, now 70, agree to this collection of the best of his writing on the Alps, South America, and of course K2.
In 1954, Bonatti was the wunderkind of Italian climbing — and on K2 the kid was a rock. While lead climbers Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli waited at Camp 9, above 26,000 feet, preparing to summit, Bonatti and a Hunza porter humped up critical oxygen tanks. But a mix-up left the two to bivouac outside the tent, and they barely survived. The others summited; their K2 triumph returned honor to postwar Italy, and Italy loved them for it. But Bonatti found himself inexplicably shunned by his expedition mates. Compagnoni and Lacedelli mistakenly believed he had tried to bogart the gas and poach the summit. Further, they claimed, the tanks he delivered weren't even full; their oxygen, they said, ran out 600 feet below the summit, forcing the pair to suck thin air all the way to the top.
Stung, Bonatti threw himself at the mountains, climbing with unrivaled boldness and style: a six-day solo of the southwest pillar of Chamonix's Petit Dru; the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV. He was only exonerated 40 years later by evidence Marshall found, a summit photograph of Compagnoni and Lacedelli inhaling gas they claimed had run out two hours earlier. But Bonatti had long since renounced climbing for photojournalism, and as illustrated by Marshall's well-chosen selections here, the loss was a great one, for climbers and readers alike.
Bonatti writes as he climbed — cleanly, with no clutter of adornment or melodrama. The Mountains of My Life should revive both his name and the English-speaking world's appetite for further volumes. Marshall had better get to work. — Bruce Barcott
