Review:
"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is a stunning book: it is a probing ethnography of the strange, unequal relationship between 'sahibs' and Sherpas, a suggestive social history of the contemporary leisure class, and a powerful, often painful meditation on the cult and culture of high-risk mountaineering. With a humane, ironic, steady, and compassionate gaze, Ortner looks at lives lived at the edge of an abyss."--Stephen Greenblatt
"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is an extraordinary study of the Sherpa people, opening windows into the realities of their lives and minds, a revelatory look at the whole mountaineering thing from their perspective, and an amazingly rich account of the fascinating world of the Himalayas and the Tibetan peoples. This book is a must read for any student of Tibet and the history of the interactions of Westerners and Tibetan peoples."--Robert Thurman
"Ortner has always been one of the clearest and most forceful writers among contemporary anthropologists and her wit and lucidity are once again in evidence here."--Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago
"This highly readable book demonstrates the best of what contemporary anthropology can offer scholars and the reading public alike. A fascinating account of a timely subject."--Naomi Bishop
"[Ortner's book] written so clearly and with such evident fascination with the subject that it's more than just accessible to lay readers: it's captivating. I've had anthropology texts put me to sleep right after morning coffee, but this one kept me awake at night."---Michael Parfit, New York Times Book Review
"Having lived and worked with the Sherpas for more than thirty years as a serious anthropologist, Ortner is in an ideal position to introduce the other, unknown culture involved with Himalayan climbing. . . . Fascinating."---Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books
"The book brings us a much richer understanding of the cultural partnership underpinning Himalayan mountaineering. . . . Life and Death on Mt. Everest is a swift and canny guide to this uncharted territory."---Alison Demos, Lingua Franca
"Sherry Ortner reveals the details of Sherpa life on and off the mountain and sweeps away a century of misguided characterizations. . . . [This] book is one of those rare crossover works, a scholarly exploration of Sherpa culture that the lay reader (climber or not) will find utterly fascinating."--Newsday
"[A] first-rate study. . . . [Ortner] is an intelligent and fair-minded scholar who has combed the mountain literature and fused it with what she observed in the field."---David Craig, Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable display of agile fieldwork, sensitive to all the distinctive shadings that compose [the] subject. . . . Ortner arrives at a complex but cohesive portrait of the century-long Sherpa association with the mountaineers."--Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Sherry B. Ortner is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her most recent publications include The Fate of "Culture": Geertz and Beyond and Making Gender. The Politics and Erotics of Culture. She has received numerous prestigious awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
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