From the Bookshelf: Into the Silence

I might not have got it without the unfortunate spur of the closest bookstore closing, but I had taken some interest in Wade Davis's book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest before that. While I didn't have many books on mountain climbing beforehand, I do have a general interest in "tales of exploration and adventure"... although that previous reading might have left me wondering a little just what sort of tale would be told. "British explorers," at least when it comes to the polar regions, get summed up and dismissed as too taken with their senses of superiority to use equipment and strategies that would actually work, and were doomed as a result to failure if not death. (With something of a weakness, perhaps, for "counter-counterarguments," I've taken notice of a few challenges to that conventional wisdom, though.)
( The first part of the subtitle... )