The Mammoth Book of on the Edge (Paperback)

Presenting first-hand accounts of climbs on the great peaks and "big walls" of five continents, spanning an arc in time from the new alpinism of the 1930s to the present, John E. Lewis takes the reader into the oxygen-gasping zone of extreme mountaineering. Among the accounts are: Reinhold Messner's successful scaling of Nanga Parbat in 1970, only to lose his brother in an avalanche on the descent Maurice Herzog's unstoppable ascent of Annapurna at the cost of his frost-bitten fingers Sebastian Snow's peak-to-peak of two Ecuadorean mountains Walter Bonatti's tragic attempt on Mont Blanc, leaving four of his seven-man party dead in the snow and Edmund Hillary's classic account of climbing Everest in 1953. This is a book about the furthest reaches of human daring and endurance.