 Book Description
This overview of Alps exploration shows how mountaineering started with the pursuit of scientific knowledge and became a dramatic competition between nations and individuals whose recorded exploits fascinated the public. Fleming records the major climbs and climbers, each with their own unique challenges, as well as the drama within teams of climbers. The author has done prodigious research and much of the book draws on the vast library of first person accounts of climbers through history. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001.
In antiquity, travelers did not enter the Alps gladly. One Roman noted that "everything in the mountains is frozen solid," while St. Ambrose, after seeing his first glacier, feared that the world would end by being suffocated in ice; heeding them, voyagers took the long way around whenever they could. All that changed in the 1800s, writes Fergus Fleming in this highly entertaining chronicle, when travelers under the spell of Enlightenment philosophers and Romantic poets came to the Alps looking for a hint of heaven on earth. Those who, for many reasons, wanted to get a little closer to the deity attempted the first recreational climbs of the mountains. They were an odd lot, indeed. One was Albert Smith, who burdened his porters with wheels of cheese and casks of wine, made his way up Mont Blanc, had a feast, and turned his adventures into a stage play that wowed London audiences throughout the 1850s. Another was the natural scientist John Tyndall, who regarded the Alps as the devil's work but nonetheless raced against his compatriot Edward Whymper to climb the Matterhorn. Still another was William Coolidge, an American-born Oxford don who made Whymper's already unhappy life just a little less pleasant. Fleming writes winningly of their "conquest" of the mountains--which, of course, has not kept succeeding generations from attempting new routes up the Alps with every climbing season. Mountaineering buffs and armchair travelers alike will enjoy his account. --Gregory McNamee
In a riveting narrative of daredevils and eccentrics, Fergus Fleming gives us the breathtaking story of some of history's greatest explorers as they conquer the soaring peaks of the Alps. Fleming recounts the incredible exploits of the men whose centuries-old fear of the mountain range turned quickly to curiosity, then to obsession, as they explored Europe's frozen wilderness. In the late eighteenth century French and Swiss scientists became interested in the Alps as a research destination, but in the 1850s the focus changed: the icy mountains now offered an all-out competition for British climbers who wanted to conquer ever higher and more impossible heights, and explorers fought each other on the peaks and in the press, entertaining a vast public smitten with their bravery, delighted by their personal animosities, and horrified by the disasters that befell them. "...excellent popular history, with its proper share of mad dogs and Englishmen....Fleming's rendition is dramatic and masterful." -- Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventure
|
