Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine

This book was a follow-up after reading Ghosts on Everest. It's a good prehistory of Everest, Mallory and Irvine. Ghosts rightfully covers the search for them but only lightly touches on Mallory and Irvine. This book talks about Mallory and Irvine and lightly touches the search for their bodies. The one thing I liked was the fact the book portrayed the men as being men. Mallory had his faults like anybody else. For example, He could be forgetful, he was a little bit of a slob and he could get moody. One thing that is lacking is the amount of information about Irvine. I see there is a book about him. If you are looking for information about the finding of Mallory's body, don't look to this book. As mentioned, it only gives a couple chapters to it. Look to Ghosts of Everest for greater detail. Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine Reading both books will give you a pretty good explanation of the story.

I know nothing about climbing or mountains, but I was recommended this book as a good read. I had no idea about the history of Everest or about Mallory and Irvine. What a great book! I loved the background and the story about these two great climbers. A great read. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Peter Firstbrook presents, essentially, a two-part text. The initial (and, overwhelming) content of the book deals factually and thoroughly with the history of the various climbing expeditions with the emphasis appropriately placed on Mallory's involvement in the whole process. The detail and insight offered by Mr. Firstbrook seems to have been genuinely and thoughtfully researched, although, I found it strange that more wasn't mentioned about Mallory's apparent disregard for his young family. Romantic letters aside, Mallory's actions clearly placed his wife and children a distant third behind his own ambition and the "chaps" with whom he fraternized. Evidence of this inconsistency in the book is liberally found whenever Mr. Firstbrook describes, in great detail, the trists that developed among Mallory and his fellow alpinist cognoscente. I suspect the omission of detail regarding Mallory's relationship with his family was a choice of the author rather than a lack of available material on the subject...The book takes a turn towards the superficial, however, when Mr. Firstbrook suddenly transitions the reader along with the expedition which found Mallory's body in 1999. Given the level of detail he was able to provide about the early expeditions, I was amazed at how little was provided about the 1999 expedition, its team members, the discovery of the body and actual clues provided by Mallory's remains. How did the team members go about the excavation of the body, for example. And, certainly, some of the dialogue among the climbers back at base camp was worth publishing, wasn't it? Similarly, the paucity of the (only) black and white photos of the 1999 expedition left me wondering why Mr. Firstbrook bothered to include them at. I suppose one can speculate that he either didn't have rights to the photos, or, omitted them out of respect for the families, or, that he was (somehow) bound by contract to Eric Simonson? Again, no explanation was offered.It appears, unfortunately, that Mr. Firstbrook was under presure to complete the work before the next guy(s) did; that may account for the (somewhat) flimsy detail and discussion provided in the last couple of chapters of the book. Doesn't the title of this book suggest an emphasis on what the search team was able to ascertain in 1999? Hell, I learned almost as much about this subject matter by watching the damn NOVA presentation!

This is a brilliant account of the history of attempts on Everest and the mystery of Mallory both as a mountaineer and as a man. Firstbrook writes in a clear no nonsense style that had me gripped from beginning to end. This is the only account where I felt that I was able to gain some understanding of the psychological motivation behind this great British mountaineer. Firstbrook is a story teller - and what a story! This is the book to read if you are interested in Mallory the man as well as Everest.

Peter Firstbrook, the author of this book thinks that it's possible. Ironically however, if they did make it, it might have helped cause their deaths. By the time they would have got there it would have been early evening at the earliest. Then tiredness, exhaustion, dehydration combined might have caused Mallory's fall to his death. The irony being that they were at that point quite close, less than 200 ft, from Camp VI, from where they set off that morning. This book is divided into two parts. Part one is a biography of George Mallory, and a brief history of Himalayan mountanerring expeditions up till the 1920s, the second is an account of the expedition that found Mallory's body earlier this year. Worth reading, if only to look at the possible scenearios and evidence