Signed by Heinrich Harrer in English and Tibetan
Heinirch Harrer signing books for our bookshop
in Banff, Canada c. 1999
New York, 1954, stated 1st edition. 268 pp, photos. Fine condition Hardcover with a Near Fine Dust Jacket.
This copy is SIGNED by Heinrich Harrer in English and Tibetan on the half-title page.
This is Harrer's masterpiece. After a 1939 German attempt on Nanga Parbat he was imprisoned by the British in India and escaped. With Peter Aufschnaiter he made it to Lhasa, where incredibly he became a friend and tutor to the current Dalai Lama who was then a teenager. A great book about independent Tibet, and it's being swallowed into China.
Harrer was an Austrian interned in British India from the beginning of World War II. Finally in 1943 he escaped from that internment and, following a lengthy travel across 'the roof of the world' he wound up in Lhasa penniless and in rags. Met with kindness in Lhasa, he was not expelled back to India. Instead he was allowed to stay in Tibet, to work for the government (he spoke passable Tibetan by this time) and to tutor the young Dalai Lama. When the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1950 Harrer was forced to part from this lonely, able and affectionate youthful Dalai Lama. What a story.
Heinrich Harrer went on to become a consumate explorer and adventurer, much like Lowell Thomas, Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman, but Harrer didn't limit his travels to mountains. Highly appreciative of native culture, Harrer travelled the world to remote mountains and jungles to experience untouched civilizations. His adventures include trips to remote Amazon jungle tribes, Pacific Islands, remote Himalaya, and New Guinea where he and Philip Temple made the first ascent of Carstensz Pyramid, one of the Seven Summits [Denali, Everest, Vinson, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Carstensz or Kosciusko].
Other notable mountaineering first ascents by Heinrich Harrer were Mount Hunter & Mount Deborah in Alaska with Fred Beckey in 1954 and Ausangate (6400m) in Peru's Cordillera Vilcanota in 1953.
