from The New York Times Book Review
posted 12.03.06
Willis’s classy style turns reportage into literature and keeps you awake...Bonington’s boys come across as raw, anguished souls who climb to distinguish themselves, but also to get away from life, to lose themselves in the vast obliteration of snow and clouds...As Willis describes in his artful prose, their suffering is not just a means to an end (the summit), it is an end. Freeze-dried and oxygen deprived, they enter the mystical realm reached long ago by mortifiers of the flesh.
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from The Washington Post
posted 12.22.06
Willis’s One of the drawbacks to being a big-mountain climber is that you end up with a lot of dead friends. Mountaineering is an imperfect art practiced in an unforgiving realm, where the smallest mistake can have disastrous consequences. And as Clint Willis tromps through his fascinating history of "climbing's greatest generation," the group of mostly English climbers around Sir Chris Bonington, who basically pioneered modern mountaineering in the 1960s and '70s, the body count rises inexorably. One of the first to go is a glamorous American named John Harlin -- his name is still spoken in hushed tones in climbing circles -- who died in a 1966 fall off the North Face of the dreaded Eiger, in the Swiss Alps, at age 21."He tumbled breathless, his mouth open," writes Willis, in one of this book's more arresting passages. "There was briefly a muffled wild joy at the speed, no surprise but rather a dazed acceptance, a new way to move through the world. The face came up to brush him and the first contact was fantastically odd -- an explosion that drove any vestige of thought from his body so that only his naked awareness remained and that only for the instant before it collapsed to a point that winked and disappeared. The body continued to fall. It careened and slid from feature to feature of the Eiger's North Face, shedding gear and then clothing and finally flesh." It's enough to make non-climbers ask again the age-old question: Why do men climb mountains?
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from The Wall Street Journal
posted 12.02.06
The book is genuinely exciting as Mr. Willis dramatically recounts the competition of egos and the close calls on treacherous Himalayan peaks... (and) grows increasingly somber as the toll grows...The story of the band of climbers known as Bonington’s Boys is a good and worthy one. Mr. Willis tells a story that is gripping and poignant and even appalling. Just like the mountains themselves.
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from The Associated Press
posted 01.22.07
Clint Willis dreamed of pursuing the kind of extreme mountaineering pioneered by a ragtag band of climbers, most of them British, who brought their sport to a new level in the three decades following the conquest of Everest. To help reconcile those unfulfilled yearnings, he detailed the astonishing accomplishments and heart-rending losses of Chris Bonington and his circle of climbers whose high-altitude expeditions in the Alps and the Himalayas have become the stuff of legends.
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from travelhappy.info
posted 01.22.07
The Boys Of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing’s Greatest Generation is a gripping biography of the daring and dangerous attempts to climb Mount Everest by a group of some of Britain’s most celebrated climbers.
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from Kirkus
posted 08.24.06
A death-haunted saga of the scalers of heaven. Mountaineering was, for many decades, a particularly British enterprise. To judge by the young men whom alpinist Chris Bonington recruited to climb with him in the 1950s and beyond, it was a British enterprise because its practitioners did all they could to escape "the villages, slums, and middle-class suburbs of post-war Great Britain." Free spirits all, these climbers proved themselves on the Alps, scaling pitches of the Eiger and Mont Blanc that no one had scaled before, fearlessly riding the "Wall of Death." Such testing done, "Bonington's Boys" were ready for the Himalayas, when that wall became a most real thing; on their 1970 ascent of Annapurna, looking for all the world more "like a traveling rock band-the Beatles on their way to visit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-than a traditional British mountaineering expedition," Bonington and company lost one of their best mates. Death would become a constant companion, and the roll of those whom outdoor sportswriter and anthologist Willis (Adrenaline 2000, 2001, etc.) rightly considers to be the greatest climbing generation in history was severely thinned by weather, accident and misjudgment. Bonington himself was a capable leader, though it was not until he was 50 that he himself made the summit of Everest, guided along by ghosts. Willis gives in at times to the temptation to throw a few Monday-morning passes, but for the most part, he offers a faithful version of events as they are known to have occurred. A notable exception is the haunting close, when climber Peter Boardman, high atop Everest, awaits death, worrying that his friends would find him there, "skin dried and drawn up on his bones, hairgone white." As indeed they did. This lacks some of the thrills and spills of Into Thin Air but is of the same class and caliber-and will make many readers wonder why anyone would ever dare climb into the clouds.
Publishers Weekly
reviewed 07.17.06
With nowhere to go but down after the 1953 conquest of Mt. Everest, mountain climbing was reinvigorated by the group of young British daredevils celebrated in this gripping adventure saga. Journalist and mountain-climber Willis (Epic) profiles elder statesman Bonington and such climbing legends as the truculent working-class prodigy Don Whillan, the austere ex-seminarian Joe Tasker and the perpetually brooding Dougal Haston, "a beatnik's idea of a Romance poet." Their ethos of anti-establishment authenticity drove them to extreme climbs in which smaller teams working with minimal gear tackled harder routes under riskier conditions. Willis narrates almost step-by-step retracings of their ascents; they dodge falling rocks, freeze and hallucinate, dangle from fraying ropes and slip heart-stoppingly into crevasses....
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MountEverest.net
reviewed 02.05.07
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MutantEggplant.com
reviewed 03.26.07
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from Climb
posted 12.29.07
So what is an American editor of ripping-yarn anthologies doing telling the heroic story of our boys as a tragedy revolving around Bonington? He didn’t know the players, so how can he possibly get this story right? Anyway, why Sir Chris Bonington and not Doug Scott? Why Everest again? And how can the style of an American writer of ‘a gripping, you-are-there quality’, as the publisher’s publicity has it, catch the tone of British expeditions that included Don Whillans, Mike Thompson and Martin Boysen?
Actually Clint Willis has done surprisingly well, partly because he has a perceptive sense of character and partly because he has listened carefully to the survivors, including giving Charlie Clarke, Jim Curran and Bonington himself a last look at the final draft. Starting with the 1958 first British ascent of the Bonatti Pillar with MacInnes, Whillans and Clough, Bonington’s pivotal influence is charted up to the final ascent of Everest himself in 1985. The title is justified by this thirty year period being marked by the watershed of the last big scale expedition to Everest’s Southwest Face in 1972 and the closure of the tragedy of losses of Bonington’s companions with the disappearance of Boardman and Tasker on Everest ten years later. The death-toll of Bonington’s friends from this period is really the tragedy of two overlapping generations, from Clough, Harlin, Haston, Burke and Escourt, to Boardman, Tasker, and Rouse.
Willis is a gripping story-teller who has paid attention to detail in all the previous accounts in order to bring them freshly to life on the page. What will be controversial is his decision to try to put himself in the mind of the participants imaginatively as a writer. The British tradition of telling these stories has been one of famous understatement. But we have grown up with this tradition because these have been the participants telling their own tales, largely to others inside the British mountaineering community who have been their expected readers. Willis is both an outsider and a writer, offering this story of Bonington’s generation to a wider audience. All of his writing skills are brought to bear upon the evidence he has sifted, which he treats with respect and sincerity, and the result is a highly readable imaginative exploration of events that implicitly raises questions which Willis makes no attempt to resolve. So we are spared an outsider’s conclusions, but have to come to terms with this story ourselves, from our own perspectives. Now our analysis should begin. But first read the three-decade roller-coaster ride of this bold, gripping and thought-provoking book.
- Terry Gifford
from Climbing
posted 08.24.06
From the harsh winter climbs of Scotland to the French Alps and, eventually, the Himalayas, The Boys of Everest tells of the accomplishments, epics, and tragedies of Sir Chris Bonington and his contemporaries in the years following the first ascent of Mount Everest. Author Clint Willis' climbing accounts are riveting, detailed, and full of insight, and his is a refreshingly honest perspective on the tragic, selfish nature of our sport.
from theadventureblog.blogspot.com
posted 01.10.07
Willis weaves an exceptional tale in this book...will leave you not only on the edge of your seat, but on the edge of the rock face itself...At times you'll swear you can feel the wind on your face, the chill in your fingers and toes, the lack of oxygen in the the air around you. You'll get a true sense of the expeditions these men conducted, and the dangers they faced, and it will leave you breathless...In case you couldn't tell, I loved The
Boys of Everest. It's a great book...I highly recommend it...Whether you'rea climber yourself, an armchair adventurer or just someone looking to read a great book filled with adventure, you'll find everything you're looking for and more in The Boys of Everest.
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from voicesfromthenorth.blogspot.com
posted 01.10.07
...wonderfully compelling...Willis sets himself apart from other more prosaic authors, and thus ensures The Boys of Everest both a wide readership and a lasting place in the literature of climbing...I receive many review books. Rarely do I read them cover to cover the day I receive them. This is one such book."
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from The Phonenix
posted 11.05.06
Clint Willis grew up reading the stories of adventurers like Chris Bonington, a twentysomething English climber around whom collected a group of young mountaineers who would redefine their sport, and, for some, the definition of the possible....
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from Library Journal Review
posted 10.26.06
This dramatic and romantic look at the greatest generation of mountaineers uses previously published accounts and interviews with the surviving climbers to describe the expeditions and what motivated these men. First ascents on the Eiger’s North Face, Annapurna’s South Face, Changabang, Everest’s Southwest Face, the Ogre and K2 are detailed and dissected....Willis’s book is an exciting reprisal of some of mountaineering’s most infamous climbers and the legends their expeditions created...recommended for public libraries...
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from Hudson Valley Papers
posted 12.03.06
The Boys of Everest is adventure writing at its best, asking and answering questions such as "Why?" and "Is it worth it?"
and "What does it all mean?" while, at the same time, providing heart-stopping stories of near-death on icy, wind-swept mountains. We couldn’t put it down.
— Anne LaFarge, Taconic Newspapers
from Williams Alumni Review
posted 10.26.06
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from Private Clubs
posted 10.21.06
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