The Boys of Everest

Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation

By: Clint Willis

Narrated by: James Adams

This gripping account of courage, achievement, and heartbreaking loss tells the story of Bonington's Boys, a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest's first ascent. The boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington's inner circle included a dozen of the most renowned climbers, who took increasingly terrible risks on now legendary expeditions to the world's most fearsome peaks, and paid an enormous price. Most of them died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: Was it worth it?

Based on interviews with surviving climbers and others, as well as five decades of journals, expedition accounts, and letters, The Boys of Everest provides the closest thing to an answer that we will ever have. It offers riveting descriptions of what Bonington's Boys found in the mountains, as well as an understanding of what they lost there.

©2006 Clint Willis (P)2007 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The performer did a great job

This is a great book to listen to if you don’t want to pay too much attention beyond the soothing voice of the narrator. Although the mountaineering stories were there, the author made some wild speculations which ultimately cast doubt on literally everything else in the book.