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Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend, by Robert Roper
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Willi Unsoeld became an international hero during the Kennedy years, when he emerged as probably the greatest American climber of the Himalayan golden age. Displaying the sort of vigor that President Kennedy so admired, Unsoeld became the most visible hero of an ascent of Everest's previously-unclimbed West Ridge -- an ascent that cost him parts of both feet and nearly his life.
His casual fearlessness and physical power established the template for extreme adventure, and his lectures as a charismatic professor inspired the generation of the sixties to test itself in acts of physical daring. Fatal Mountaineer sets Willi Unsoeld's intense life against the story of two defining adventures: the triumph on Everest and a more ill-starred expedition in 1976, when he led a group of mountaineers up a new route on Nanda Devi, the tallest peak in India. One of that gifted group of climbers was Willi's daughter, Devi -- a golden girl named for the mountain she sought to ascend with her beloved father. The intense rivalries within the expedition team, and the dangers of the route, led to an outcome darkened by tragedy, an outcome that continues to fuel one of the most tormenting debates in mountaineering history.
Blending adventure with a frank look at the cultural background, Fatal Mountaineer considers the pressures on mountaineers in a period of our history torn by conflict. It balances hunger for fame with stark tragedy, a man's ambition with a father's love. Unsoeld emerges as an American classic, a self-invented genius of adventure to rank with Mark Twain or Will Rogers for sheer attractiveness. Under the close scrutiny of this thrilling story, his heroism turns out to be deeply authentic-as does his suffering.
- Sales Rank: #1853222 in Books
- Published on: 2002-03-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.62" h x 1.32" w x 5.54" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Unsoeld, who made the first ascent of Mt. Everest's West Ridge in 1963, was perhaps the most influential high-altitude mountain climber of the 1960s and 1970s; as a professor of philosophy at Evergreen State College, he was also an entertaining and "spellbinding" lecturer. The bulk of Roper's gripping biography describes Unsoeld's 1976 Indo-American Nanda Devi Expedition, which he conceived as a tribute to both to the first ascent of India's tallest peak in 1936 and to his 22-year-old daughter, Devi, who was named after the mountain and who joined the expedition as the fulfillment of a dream. Roper presents the troubled expedition marked by infighting, sickness and Devi's death from intestinal problems just short of the peak as a "sea-change" in climbing: whereas "the ethos of camaraderie" had been essential in Unsoeld's 1963 ascent, by the mid-'70s, it had disappeared. ("As Tom Wolfe declared," Roper writes, "it was the `Me Decade.' ") Through an analysis of Unsoeld's graduate studies in philosophy, Roper shows how the Nanda Devi climb was, in many respects, the realization of Unsoeld's belief that when an "outcome is shadowed by doubt and you may well be on a suicide mission, you feel most intensely alive." But in the two years of life that remained to him (he died in a Mt. Rainier avalanche in 1979), Roper argues that Unsoeld was "devoted to an active refusal to recognize what had happened." This is a provocative look at a still-legendary climber. Two 8-page b&w photo inserts not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
A spirit-seeking hippie before hippies even existed, mountaineering legend Willi Unsoeld named his daughter after India's tallest peak: Nanda Devi. Twenty-two years later, in 1976, Nanda Devi died on Nanda Devi. Her fate, her father's attitude about climbing, and mountaineering's transition from amateur hobby to slick commercial enterprise are all covered in this book. Roper does not offer a biography (a niche filled by Lawrence Leamer's Ascent, 1982) but, rather, sorts out conflicting accounts of Unsoeld's dissension-wracked expedition to Nanda Devi. Ostensibly undertaken to commemorate its first summitting in 1936, the expedition's real motive was to facilitate Nanda Devi's intimate communing with her eponym. Famed as half the duo that first climbed Everest via its western ridge in 1963, Unsoeld was past his prime 13 years later. So the group included a younger, stronger alpinist named John Roskelly, who was not looking for Hindu deities or self-actualization; he hoped to become an entrepreneurial guide. Not the smoothest of narratives, Roper's story of the conflict will nevertheless gain purchase with fans of adventure books. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Fatal Mountaineer...combines vivid characterization, gripping accounts of extreme mountaineering and accessible technical information, as well as pertinent cultural historical and philosophical reflection. It's a rich tapestry, a book for both the general reader and the climbing fanatic. Floyd Skloot, San Francisco Chronicle
A cautionary tale of how pursuit of a mountain at any cost and in any weather can have deadly consequences. Lynn Arave, Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT)
With journalistic skill, Roper also delves into Unsoeld's transcendental philosophies and their fallacies...The book's greatest accomplishment is in the light it sheds on the shadows of mountain climbing and the impossible ideals of a hero. --Mark Larabee, The Oregonian
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
You will love this book!
By Vickie Wyatt
For a non-mountain climber, non-adventurer like myself, this book was a take-me-away introduction to people who are very different from me. I planned to give the book away after I read it, so instead of underlining, like I ususually do when I read, I made notes on the inside back cover of favorite passages. I had 60 of them to type up before I could let the book go. Roper always saves his best sentence for last, always makes you wish you had more than ten minutes to read at a time, always lets the adventure speak to you without requiring you to be knowledgeable about mountain climbing. It isn't a treatise on mountain climbing. It is an idea-stretching, glorious opportunity to climb your own personal mountain.
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A complex, meandering read
By Thomas H. Hahn
I just put this book down, after having spent much of the past two days with it in my comfortable armchair. A little reseach yielded the fact that the book did just recently win the rather prestigeous Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in Nov. 2002. I believe this is well-deserved.
Part travelogue, part psycho-philosophical profile of one of the greatest American mountaineers, Roper attempts to contextualize Unsoeld's biography around a variety of fixtures. The "ropes" the authors uses to advance to the "summit" (i.e. the fictional representation of the perceived innermost truth about Unsoeld's life and ulterior motive) are made up of such materials as the history of mountain climbing, political sciences, small group psychology field tests, local religious practice, Bergson and various wilderness philosophies. IMHO, some "ropes" in use are only nine mille thick, while others do last the test of critical readership without fraying. The weave or texture of the theoretical excursions with the main storylines feels strenuous in part, and the reader is thrown into a disjointed crevasse here and there, although there are ladders lying around to drag oneself out of such uneven terrain, such as by simply ignoring a pager or two (but not more!). Even for the uninitiated, it is quite possible to foresee Devi's death by, say, page 15 or earlier already (there are only three children present at Willi's funeral, so clearly something must have gone wrong), and it takes a long climb and some patience to finally sit on the buttress and experience the tragedy of Devi's death.
The characterization of the main protagonists may pose problems for some. Lev and Andy and the rest are set in stark contrast to Unsoeld and Roskell(e)y, with the danger of contructing antagonies between the two main figures where there perhaps were none, or none of importance and consequence anyway. It's a temptation for any author to deal with two such diverse characters, and NOT to have them squarely oppose each other, philosophically or in any other form. To give in to the temptation, the story itself attains higher (or lower, depending on your view) ground, and in all complexity becomes easier to follow and to understand. If all this has happened and was in fact the case I am quite doubtful, not having read Roskelley's book (yet). What troubles me, too, and another reviewer took note of that already, is the silence of Willi's family in the book, with one small exception (Willi's older sister), and one big exception (Devi herself, of course). In an attempt to establish an environment of credibility for his narrative, Roper should have explored those avenues of memory more carefully. But perhaps he did, and when he says in the afterword that some did not want Willi's story to be told, he probably includes family members and close relatives.
In the end I must say I loved the intricate mesh of events, people and lifestyles, of virtue and philosophies. The way Roper tries to establish principles and seek meaning in modern mountaineering through two major protagonists makes sense to me, although on a larger scale, he may be a tad too quick to dismiss traditional western notions of humanism towards (raw) nature in exchange for sheer opportunism and empty but marketable self-promotion.
Highly recommended for careful reading.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
It could have been a great book, but the author was all over the ...
By Clayton Davis
Strange book. It could have been a great book, but the author was all over the place. I stuck with it and kept hoping that sooner or later it would get better. But it didn't. Willi was a fascinating guy, but this book didn't do him justice.
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