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The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas
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56
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
78/100Critics
35/100Scholars
Author:
Scott Ellsworth
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Date:
February 18, 2020
While tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was raging across the Himalayas. Contingents from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States had set up rival camps at the base of the mountains, all hoping to become recognized as the fastest, strongest, and bravest climbers in the world.
What The Reviewers Say
... gripping.
... [a] fast-paced survey of Himalayan mountaineering history.
... [a] thrilling though sometimes episodic and repetitive account of the extraordinary athletes, daredevils, visionaries, and fools who joined in the competition to scale the world’s highest peaks between the 1930s and the mid-1950s.
The World Beneath Their Feet contains plenty of rollicking stories, but reading it is nevertheless something of a trudge. To reach the end, intrepid readers must brave the blizzard of Ellsworth’s clumsy metaphors, tiptoe round his broken grammar, and skirt the yawning crevasses of hyperbole into which his prose frequently falls.
