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Into The Silence

Into The Silence

The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

Summary

**Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award**

A monumental work of history, biography and adventure - the First World War, Mallory and Mount Everest - now serialised in the BBC R4 documentary The Crowning of Everest.

'The price of life is death'


For Mallory, as for all of his generation, death was but 'a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day'. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. What mattered now was how one lived, and the moments of being alive.

While the quest for Mount Everest may have begun as a grand imperial gesture, it ended as a mission of revival for a country and a lost generation bled white by war. In a monumental work of history and adventure, Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept climbing on that fateful day.

'An extraordinary book on an extraordinary generation' Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void

'An instant classic of mountaineering literature' Guardian

A moving, epic masterpiece' The Times

Reviews

  • Maybe the prime minister should read it
    Stephen Frears, Guardian

About the author

Wade Davis

Wade Davis is a multi award-winning writer and acclaimed photographer whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. He is the bestselling author of 22 books, including One River, The Wayfinders and Into the Silence, which was awarded the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.
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