Tenzing: Hero of Everest

It's a biography, not a "mountaineering book" as such. With that understood up front, this life story of Tenzing Norgay provides the reader with both well researched information and thoughtful analysis. Tenzing Norgay adopted "Sherpa" as his identity only after his 1953 summit of Mt. Everest with New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary. Born to Tibetian parents within sight of the moutain that would change his life so completely, Tenzing at age 20 migrated to Darjeeling - the Indian mountain city famed for its importance to British colonials who summered there - in order to give himself and the family he would soon have a future. In the world of his boyhood and young manhood, borders mattered little. One's identity came from family, not place of birth. Tenzing learned climbing by working for foreign expeditions, in the beginning for the same reason as any other young man of his time and place: because it was how he could make a living. As he learned, though, and as he became friends with some of his employers - most notably Swiss climber Raymond Lambert - Tenzing began to share their passion for making it to the top. That was not among the values of his own culture, and pursuing it set him apart in ways that would persist through the rest of his life. The book is organized to place the summiting of Everest roughly at its mid-point, and that's appropriate because the event defined Tenzing's life in a similar way. A highly intelligent yet illiterate man who navigated not just two cultures, but many, with surprising success. A back-country tribesman who became a close friend and frequent house guest to India's Prime Minister Nehru. A world traveler whose natural shrewdness in interacting with other people, regardless of culture, sometimes failed him. A father of two families, one born to him in his 20s and the other in his 50s, who wanted the best for all of his children and who did all that he could - as he understood it - to make that happen. Biographer Douglas does a more than creditable job of exploring his subject within the context of background, time, and place. His thoroughness does lead to passages where a reader without a particular interest in that time and place, not just in Tenzing Norgay, may bog down; but otherwise the book is entirely readable, and I found those passages essential to its credibility.

In this thoughtful, well researched and educational book, Ed Douglas has delved far beneath the superficial surface of Tenzing, Sherpas and Himalayan climbing. The history and lead up to the 1953 climb with Ed Hillary is both thoughtful and highly detailed but despite the incredible academic depth and factual information, this book is highly readable and appealing to anyone who seeks knowledge of Tenzing's extraordinary beginnings in Tibet, move to Nepal and settling in Darjeeling to be close to the action for all pre world war 2 expeditions to the Everest region. Douglas's accurate descriptions of some of these early expeditions to Everest and other high peaks make "Into Thin Air" look like a church picnic. Most of all we get a true picture of life as a Sherpa rising to Sirdar status and what singled out Tenzing from all the others. This is a human story complete with all the highs and lows of struggle, family, ambition, success and failure, with eventual world accolade diminishing into depressiion, loneliness and frustration. This is a book that every interested world mountaineer should read. It finally puts into perspective what went on during those amazing decades from the 20s to the 70s.