London, 1986, 1st edition. 322 pp, b/w photos. Navy cloth hardcover with dust jacket. Fine condition.
For more than sixty years - since George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last seen only eight hundred vertical feet from the summit of Everest - mystery and controversy have surrounded their tragic 1924 ascent. Did Mallory, the expedition leader and hero of the Bloomsbury set, reach the highest point on the earth almost thirty years before Sir Edmund Hillary's historic climb?
In this dramatic re-creation of the epic adventure, Tom Holzel, an American mountaineer, and Audrey Salkeld, Britian's leading mountaineering historian, offer new revelations and persuasive theories that challenge the history of mountain climbing. Beyond the historic climb is the compelling story of Mallory himself. Intimate of Rupert Brooke and Lytton Strachey, and the man whose romantic vision fired the imagination of an earlier generation, he was destined to follow the poetic ideal in life and in death.
