High Exposure
The New York Times
Book Review, Bruce Barcott
Breashears knows how to convey the passion of mountaineering on film,
but on the page he rarely pauses to savor the details or tease out the
drama...
From the Foreword by
Jon Krakauer, author of Into
Thin Air
"My intent is not to nominate David Breashears for sainthood. I have
spent enough time in his proximity to know that he is impatient, driven,
incredibly tightly wound... But he possesses, in abundance, a quality
perhaps best described as 'character'. And I admire this trait even more
than I admire what he has achieved in the arenas of film and
mountaineering."
From Stephen Ambrose,
author of Undaunted
Courage
"I've spent a lifetime reading books by or about the famous
adventurers...David Breashears's book is the first I've read by an
end-of-the-twentieth-century mountain climber that surpasses many of them
and is equal to all."
From Booklist ,
April 15, 1999
Second to the obsession to top Mount Everest is the fixation on
reading about it, and Breashears has succumbed to both temptations. The
mountain's literature inspired him in boyhood; in adulthood, he is
celebrated for his filmmaking, particularly his spectacular Everest IMAX
movie released in 1998. Breashears' account of its production against the
grim background of the 1996 climbing catastrophe brackets this memoir of
other feats of his climbing and working life. Breashears wryly relates his
roughnecking period on Wyoming oil wells, which apart from its tough
amusement, shows him following the Algerian credo that the trip to the top
starts at the bottom. He carried that precept to mountain filmmaking,
talking his way into the job of cameraman's assistant for a team filming
on Yosemite's El Capitan. His developing camera's eye was grounded in
rock-climbing skills honed in the hang-loose scene in 1970s Colorado,
whose dedication to an ineffable, ethical purity in mountain climbing he
managed to practice between film projects. A poignant instance is his and
a friend's ascent up a mile-high face of Kwangde, "my finest alpine
experience in the Himalayas." Then came the IMAX project, the deaths
and rescue dramatized in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997),
Breashears' team's resumption of their summit attempt, and the subsequent
ascent past frozen-solid corpses. Whatever mystery seduces climbers to
risk all on Everest continues to vicariously inveigle readers--and there
will be the publisher's full-service publicity campaign to remind them of
their obsession. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
From Booklist ,
August 19, 1997
This glossy album of photos and text has two high-interest attributes:
it is the companion to an IMAX film slated for 1998 release about an
expedition to Everest; and the IMAX filmmakers participated in the May_
1996 disaster-and-rescue drama on the mountain, a chronicle of which (Into
Thin Air by Jon Krakauer ) rocketed to first place on best-seller
lists. Perhaps the latter fact makes National Geo's marketeers hopeful and
tips libraries to inevitably strong demand for the title. The text is
descriptive of the film team's reactions to the crisis but is a less
compelling read than Into Thin Air; its signal asset is the
hundred-plus photos of the earth's most titanic vistas. Alone worth the
price of admission, the images allow the armchair alpinist to wonder at
the sights both cultural and natural from Katmandu to the summit. Scenes
of marketplaces, yak trains, Sherpas, and temples are buttressed by author
Coburn's information about propitiation rituals and prayers addressed to
mountain deities--not a bad idea before taking on a mountain that kills 20
percent of those who reach the top. Sidebars are varied, summing up the
active geology of the Himalaya, the story of survivor Beck Weathers, or
that of Everest's first summiteer, Tenzing Norgay, whose son figures in
this expedition and in a triumphant photo at the summit. The pictures are
absolutely awesome and exhilarating, fully imparting the lure and
deadliness of an Everest experience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright© 1997, American Library Association. All rights reserved
