From Publishers Weekly: On September 29, 1988, Allison stood atop Mt. Everest, the first American woman to reach the summit. Her achievement was doubly gratifying since it came on the heels of a failed attempt in 1987, defeated by the weather. Allison recounts her introduction to serious climbing in such places as Zion National Park, Yosemite, Mt. McKinley, Ama Dablam in Nepal.
From Kirkus Reviews: Nail-biting mountaineering wins out over soap-operatics in this absorbing tale of a woman conquering internal and external mountains. On September 29, 1988, Allison became the first American woman to stand at the peak of Mt. Everest. But her training began decades earlier, when she tried rock climbing in Utah's Zion National Park ("everything I learned electrified me'') and was instantly hooked.
Nonetheless, she values her love relations and relays them in school girl detail: "We lay there on our backs, talking about the stars....I was thinking: He's going to kiss me.'' The aim of this awkward dear-diary stuff seems to be to link true romance (which Allison finds with second husband David; her first turns out to be a wife-beater) and the attainment of mountain summits. No matter- -the action on the slope is what counts, and once up - especially above 19,000 feet, in the "Death Zone'' - Allison's account of mountaineering is as gritty as any. When she stands atop Everest and declares, "I was wide open now, and I was aware of everything....I was standing on the top, looking down at the world,'' readers will join in her gusto. Allison plans a summer 1993 assault on the world's most treacherous peak, K2; this memoir, despite its unnecessary soapiness, will find its own place in that small pile of really first-rate mountaineering books.
