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Thursday, November 18, 2010
Surmountable

Title: Summit Fever
By: Andrew Greig

Most mountaineering writers are mountaineers first. Poet and novelist Andrew Greig did it the opposite way: he joined an attempt on the “unclimbable” Mustagh Tower as expedition scribe, and emerged a mountaineer. Summit Fever, his account of that expedition, is an idiosyncratic classic. Greig may have driven his companions crazy with his often-naïve questions (“What’s this for? How come ye do it that way?”), but the result is a book that is fascinating to readers who only dream of climbing, as well as to the hard core. There’s a wild poetry here — frenetic, scatological, hilarious — that sets off the rare moments of repose. Read this book for the mountaineering lore or the love of a talented Scot’s English, and then pass it around. It deserves to be better known.

View similarly tagged posts: non-fiction, biography, travel

Posted by curious on Nov. 18, 2010 at 12:46 p.m.
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