| Title | : | The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna--the World's Deadliest Peak |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 030772042X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780307720429 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 281 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2011 |
The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna--the World's Deadliest Peak Reviews
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This one is neck and neck with Ed's K2 book--I read them back to back and enjoyed both much more than The Mountain, his Everest book. I wanted to read this one because there's a massive canon on Everest and K2, but now I want to know more about all the other 8,000 meter peaks, especially those that have claimed the lives of famous mountaineers. It's a fine portrait of the history of Annapurna, and of course Ed's own quest to top the mountain. Like in his K2 book, he weaves in and out from his own expeditions and famous climbs/deaths in Annapurna's timeline.
I covered my reservations with Ed's canon in my other reviews, but they hold here: he's so nice. So upstanding. Sometimes it makes for slightly less interesting storytelling, and a frustration that he won't condemn other climbers (except when he does ha). So there's always a fine shellac on Ed's stories. He doesn't delve into the salacious. I'd be very interested to see more books on Annapurna that lay bare some of the darker recesses of human nature/mountaineering.
Probably my favorite aspect of this book was a deeper dive into Anatoli Boukreev--at first I was confused because it was talking about Everest and Lhotse, but then I realized "ah, he must have died on Annapurna." I appreciated the portrait of him as a climber, and the inclusion of some translations from his journals, to give a view into his perspective. He was much maligned for his role in the 1996 Everest tragedy, which Viesturs does address. I do have my own thoughts on his actions on Everest, but this book provided such a rich portrait of who he was as a climber. He was a really interesting mountaineer with some beautiful philosophy of climbing and this book does a good job of showing you other sides of him as a person and climber instead of as a Russian caricature. Just makes his death so sad.
Overall recommend for a picture of Annapurna as a mountain. -
I liked No Shortcuts better. I will always read Viesteurs, and his stories inspire me to get back out there and go up a glacier, but this was less a story about his own climb. No Shortcuts tells Ed's Annapurna climb stories more succinctly and clearly than this does. This is a rambling, wonderfully told set of vignettes about the history of climbing Annapurna. It reads as a Who’s Who in the climbing industry along with a resume clip of each from the vantage of Annapurna. A wonderful read, but not what I was expecting. Ed is great, however, at introducing real life characters and making you understand their personalities and making you care about their endeavors, their trials and their successes.
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Another mountaineering book--I'm fascinated by what drives these people, although I have no desire to climb any mountains myself. Ed Viesturs relives his own journey up Annapurna (the mountain with the highest death rate of all the mountains above 8000 meters) and describes other noteworthy expeditions. His passion and his heart shine through the words he's written.
But as interesting as it was, this wasn't Viesturs' best book. The repetition got annoying--it felt like Viesturs wasn't expecting us to read the book all the way through, for some reason, so he had to repeat everything in every chapter. (I swear, he told us about 47 times that J-C Lafaille wanted revenge on Annapurna because Annapurna had killed his partner.) The K2 stories (
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain) were better, and Viesturs' book about climbing all 8000+ peaks (
No Shortcuts to the Top) had better information. -
Viesturs phoned this one in. It's a sloppily-edited rehash of mountaineering anecdotes from other climber's books. It's also full of sniping at Jon Krakauer, who really writes good stuff about climbing. Take a pass on this book.
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This is an amazing book written by Ed Viesturs and David Roberts. Not only does Ed talk about his account of Annapurna, but about 80% of the book is dedicated to talking in depths about other expeditions on Annapurna and through different routes. The emotions are described as raw as one could. The chapter 'Nemesis' in his 'No shortcuts to the top' had more detail, in my opinion. However, his generous writings of excerpts from books of Loretan and of J.C's expeditions besides that of others are truly wondrous to read. Ed is truly a mountaineering hero. The little pieces of Annapurna expeditions of different parties glued into one book makes this a one-stop book for understanding and appreciating the beautiful-but-deadly mountain that Annapurna is.
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Once again Ed had me hanging on every word with his captivating storytelling and knowledge. I simply loved it.
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A really good book. It chronicles an extensive climbing history of Annapurna, it's most famous ascenders and their fates (on or after the mountain), and the book also delves into Ed's own struggles, thoughts and fears on his 3 attempts @ the world's deadliest mountain and on other peaks too. I especially appreciated and could relate to the author's dialogue concerning mountaineering and how it affects loved ones, especially wife and kids. Although I'm not even in the same galaxy as Ed and these climbers when it comes to mountaineering knowledge, experience and high altitude accomplishments, the same types of feelings and discussions are had in my household when planning for and heading off on another, possibly dangerous, or even deadly, trip. Plus Ed signed my copy and wrote, "Good luck on Denali." Whenever that opportunity presents itself, and I get up and down successfully, I hope to leaf back thru the book to the first page so I can thank Ed for the kind words of encouragement.
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Like “Tour de France” and “Campagnolo,” two names I encountered in a cycling shop during my teen years, which connected only tenuously with the $100 Schwinn 10-speed I rode ever day, I met the name “Annapurna” somewhere in the past. The particular poetry of its sound and rhythm stuck in my head, but I knew little of the mountain itself until the recent day when I read the full title of this book. It was on the cover of a review copy at work, which I grabbed, eager to learn at last what in the world those four syllables pointed to.
Ed Viesturs knew very well what Annapurna meant before he left adolescence. By the age of 20, he had read a French account of the first expedition to reach its top, as well as many other mountaineering books, and had decided to become a climber. How to describe Viesturs? He’s accomplished enough that he has summited five times on Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain (and the only giant most people seem to hear about). He made one of those climbs with a team hauling an IMAX camera that, at 40-something pounds, most of us wouldn’t eagerly carry up the street. And Annapurna? It’s not a mere mountain; to climbers, it’s one of the mountains. Fourteen peaks in the world are more than 8,000 meters high, Annapurna among them. As Viesturs explains late in this book, by way of justifying his title, “It’s become a standard gauge of danger on the highest peaks to calculate the ratio of fatalities to summiteers. Thus the Annapurna ratio [about 183 reaching the top versus 61 deaths] is exactly 33 percent.… K2 comes close…, with a balance hovering around 25 percent. No other mountain in the world is in this ballpark.”
Those numbers are chilling, but, as with names, what matters are what they mean. Those 8,000-plus meters (more than 4.97 miles) are ticked off vertically, dragging your body and your gear across snow, ice, and rock, evading or bridging crevasses, hoping an avalanche doesn’t catch you, struggling to enter—more important, then to get out of—a high zone in which essentially nothing lives. What’s that like? Viesturs, the only American to have reached the top of all 14 “8,000-ers” (the term he and others use) without supplemental oxygen, wants to give us some idea in this book.
His prose, crafted with climber-writer David Roberts, is conversational. You get the impression that if he sat down with you to talk about mountains, he’d tell his stories pretty much as he does here. His plain style doesn’t get in the way of the subject, but it’s not the most flavorful. Not a problem, because Viesturs quotes liberally from other writings—some of it out of print, never translated to English, or never published at all—in the course of recounting other expeditions. (While admitting that this book returns to some ground he has covered in previous books, he says a rethink has brought him new perspectives.)
My personal favorite among those quoted is French climber Erhard Loretan, whose writing can be sly—the almost childlike simplicity of a tortoise-and-hare comparison—or disarmingly comic, as when he and a partner stagger into a base camp like “starving zombies.” Loretan sometimes approaches the poetic. During the nearly unendurable ordeal of descending Annapurna, the two men find an abandoned camp and the body of a Sherpa: “Without any coffin except a sarcophagus of ice, without any roof except the sky.” And it’s Loretan who describes his traverse of Annapurna as venturing “so far from the living and so close to the dead.”
Though its focus is on Annapurna and climbing at a high level (in both senses), the book serves in ways as an introduction to mountaineering. One learns that there are two broad methods—the alpine style and the expedition, the former traveling fast and light, the latter slower, more methodical, consolidating each gain with a stocked camp—and you find individual styles as well. (There is also, I was glad to learn, more than one gender on these slopes. Men predominate, but Viesturs takes note of a team of women who tackled Annapurna, some of whom reached the summit.) There are many potential routes to the top of most mountains. The most ambitious climbers have won their renown by doing something new—if not a new route, then a different season, or a solo attempt. And there’s more than one approach to recounting what one has done. It may be stereotyping, but one is tempted to see something traditionally Gallic in Loretan’s style, something more Germanic in the heroic tone of master climber Reinhold Messner, and possibly something American in the straightforward, declarative style of Viesturs.
One learns a good deal more from The Will to Climb as well. Filling out the statistics I quoted, the text is shot through with the names and stories of climbers who have died, whether on Annapurna or on another of the 14. (As with styles and routes, there are many ways to die.) The names of the peaks and their ranges are here too, sometimes plain, sometimes nearly unpronounceable, usually scented with the exotic: the Karakoram and Himalaya ranges, and mountains ranging from K2 (a never-replaced map designation) and Broad Peak to Gasherbrum I and II, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Cho Oyu. And one comes to appreciate the sense of Viesturs’s climbing principles. His motto may seem obvious and might not be contested, down at ground level, by most other climbers, but with a summit in view, some have ignored it: “Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” That’s smart, though it’s not all one needs: “to a certain extent you’re always rolling the dice.”
Does any of this really tell you what it’s like? Yes and no. Nowadays one may hear it said, by people in the throes of some arduous but hardly unique experience, that no one can imagine it, or at least that no one who hasn’t been there can. There’s some truth to this. But there would be little point in writing if one felt that one couldn’t convey much and that readers wouldn’t understand—little point in reading the result either. Words in good hands do point to something beyond themselves. Annapurna now means much more to me.
There really is no frigate like a book; books can take us where boats don’t go. How The Will to Climb will sit with those who have experience in the extreme, almost absurd “sport” of mountaineering I can’t judge. But for me it was a voyage all right.
[P.S. I read an advance uncorrected proof, with none of the photographs mentioned in the acknowledgments.] -
One man’s journey and story to climb Annapurna but in the context of his climbing career (last of the fourteen 8000ers) and history of the mountain. Didn’t realize Annapurna was the most dangerous mountain in the world. Favorite chapter was the second to last that went through the story of his successful summit of Annapurna. Ed’s account of climbing in the Himalayan’s made it seem possible and so realistic but at the same time made me realize I will never do something so difficult and extreme. I have alpine mountaineered a few Cascade range mountains and found inspiration and admiration from Ed’s story.
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I'm so far from those heroes. But they are my heroes...
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Four and a half stars! Excellent stories about the history of climbing on Annapurna, the world's deadliest peak. (It has the highest ratio of # of fatalities vs # of people who summit, 33%. K2 is the only other mountain close to that ratio at 25%. Everest is "only" 9%). Having read Herzog's Annapurna exactly 30 years ago, I was immediately drawn in to Ed's review of that 1950 expedition to successfully climb the first 8000 meter peak. It also covers the history of the first few people to climb all 14 8000ers; Annapurna is 10th tallest. Ed was also on Everest during the '96 disaster and goes over that a bit while telling Anatoli Boukreev's story. So much good information in one place! And I've read quite a few mountaineering books. I always love when there are high quality color photos of the mountain showing the different routes so you can try to pick out where on the route they are during the stories. I go back to those pictures many many times during the book. Nice job Ed Viesturs and Dave Roberts.
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This book was not as cohesive as his previous works - the flow of the work was jolting as Ed jumped from scenario to scenario. The book chronicles attempts on Annapurna in sequence since the initial summit on the first attempt (the only 8000m peak to do so) and Viesturs covers each historical epoch with fantastic detail, there are too many references to other experiences on other mountains to keep the entire story straight. Facts and people become easily confused to the reader. Sometimes you had to wade through paragraphs before coming back around to the central narrative of the chapter. He definitely was attempting to do with Annapurna as he had for "K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain" and I hope he attempts to do so for other 8000m peaks down the line - the K2 book was absolutely enthralling. I believe Ed to be an absolutely fantastic Mountain Historian and "The Will to Climb" wasn't bad at all - just not as good as his other two previous works.
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I love reading Ed Viesturs climbing books and The Will to Climb is no different. However this is the least favourite of the three I’ve read of his. I highly recommend his
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain or
No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks if you want to read him for the first time.
Although I couldn’t think of anything worse than high altitude climbing (or any climbing to be honest) I really love reading about it. I personally think anyone who wants to climb these peaks are madmen or women but their endeavours sure are entertaining. -
I have always been a fan of Ed Viestur's books and had picked this one knowing how the mountain taunted him and was his last 8K mountain on his way to achieve 14 8K peaks. Annapurna also carries the thrill for me owing to book of Maurice Herzog which is the first mountaineering book I read as narrated by the person who is part of expedition.
Ed is a personal hero for me for his clear conceptualization of acceptable risk which was instrumental in him getting back home from all his 8K expeditions. Considering how difficult it was for him to claim Annapurna and death rate of 1 for every 3 attempted, this mountain to me is the most dangerous one to attempt a summit. This book also reminded me that fascination about mountains is not sufficient, it requires immense hard work, dedication to the sport of mountain climbing to consider an attempt at any 8K peak let alone something as scary as Annapurna.
PS - This book is only for those who read lot of literature on mountaineering. -
Overall I really enjoyed this history of attempts to climb Annapurna, and didn’t even really mind the many tangents wound throughout the book, as I find mountaineering fascinating. What dropped this from 4 stars to 3 for me was the sexist attitude that the author obviously holds, despite his attempts to veil it with catch all “I won’t share my thoughts about that topic” lines. There was also a lot of “third world country” and “ugh what terrible sleeping conditions and dirtiness” that really rubbed me the wrong way for a very wealthy man who comes in to these places to ostensibly play king of the mountain while hiring these local people to do very dangerous jobs. I get the feeling that while I admire the author’s accomplishments, I don’t think I would enjoy conversing with him in person.
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This book is intense. How do you get more intense than talking about climbing a mountain that every 2 people that reach the summit, 1 man dies. Or woman, actually....let me start over.
How do you get more intense than talking about climbing a mountain that every 2 people that reach the summit, 1 WOMAN dies.
It's a personal saga of his many failed and eventually successful attempt to reach the summit of the most dangerous peak in the world. I was cringing throughout the read. It's an amazing and in depth history of the attempts to conquer Annapurna. Well I know an Anna and she's almost as deadly.
The Will to Climb....Five Stars. -
This reminded me of the xkcd strip about wine connoisseurs. To quote:
“If you locked people in a box for a year with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they’d be adamant that some were great and some terrible.”
I do not have aspirations to climb 8000-meter peaks. I was hoping for Viesters’ insights, especially given the choice of title, but this book was probably 60% mountaineering history, 39% memoire, and only 1% relating any of that to “normal” life.
Takeaways:
1. Very strong friendships are build when lives are on the line
2. When pursuing rare activities, kinship is built even among people who have never met -
After a while all the harrowing stories seem to blend together, which I know is not fair. And I had never considered that there is almost a whole genre of mountain climber story books; this one's pretty good. Then, when you consider that different climbers had different viewpoints on 'who did what' on some particular mountains/seasons, you should wonder how anyone who sets out to do a Himalayan peak could come to he party ill-prepared.
If you only ever read one mountain climbing book, this one's a good choice, but Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" might be a better bet. -
I’m a huge fan of Ed Viesturs and David Roberts. I’ve previously read No Shortcuts and K2, so it was natural that I read The Will To Climb. Absolutely brilliant book. Kept me turning the page so much that I read it quicker than any other book I’ve read.
If you enjoy this book and you haven’t already read it, I’d highly recommend reading Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna. Viesturs references it quite a bit in this book and it’s an incredible read about the first ascent of an 8000 metre peak (not to mention on the deadliest mountain!) -
In this book Ed Viesturs manages to tell his own story of closing the loop on all fourteen 8,000m peaks, but interweaves the narratives of those who went before, giving us the right questions to frame the analogue between climbing and life:
1) why are you doing this?
2) are you okay with turning around when there is a risk that is too great?
3) can you put your ego in check, particularly when it means being part of a team instead of being an individual climber?
4) can you take the time to savor victories?
Well worth a read. -
I quite liked this book, Viesturs has amazing stories to tell, but it does bother me a bit that it was Co-written. David Roberts is also a well known climber and became part of the narrative at times — I found this little off putting and confusing (who’s book is this?). I’ve seen Viesturs speak, he’s very articulate, he obviously has a lot to say, I know he went to college... so write your own book dummy
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The shock duo of Ed Viesturs and David Roberts comes back with another book.
What do you get when you cross the United States’ foremost Himalayan climber and the dean of climbing literature, and throw in a pinch of Annapurna obsession for good measure? An excellent book.
Follow Mr. Viesturs on his multi-year quest to close the loop on the 14 8,000-meter peaks by finally climbing what is arguably the most dangerous one: Annapurna.
A compelling, engaging read! -
My favorite bits of this were the excerpts from Erhard Loretan, particularly the part were he responded to awe at his east ridge traverse with, "I think you are a bit exaggerating about our climb!!??" What a wonderfully absurd writer.
Viesturs, as always, knows his stuff, although I think I was more riveted by his account of K2. -
great book about this subject.
through reading Ed Viesturs books I have gained much insight into the mountain climbing world. I've also appreciated the ambition, training and skill it takes to do it.
i find him quite humble & honest in his writing about himself. -
Well written with many accounts of other expeditions and daring mountaineers. Liked the philosophy about "Reaching to the top is just half a journey. Coming back alive is the rest." Overall it was a good book.
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Great book. Enjoyed the read.
