Touching My Father's Soul: A Sherpa's Sacred Jouney to the Top of Everest - Softcover

Coburn, Broughton; Norgay, Jamling Tenzing

3.98

2,608 ratings by Goodreads

9780091884673: Touching My Father's Soul: A Sherpa's Sacred Jouney to the Top of Everest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091884675 ISBN 13: 9780091884673

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2002

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A book of adventure, wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.

Touching My Father's Soul recounts Tenzing's son, Jamling Norgay's treacherous climb to the world's most forbidding summit. As retold in Krakauer's Into This Air, the 1996 IMAX climbing expedition collided with tragedy. As the climb unfolds so too does Norgay's inner journey. His desire to finally stand alongside his father's soul on the summit of Everest is realised, as is an understanding of his family's Sherpa history and a realisation of the power and significance of the Himalayas. Beautifully repackaged for the paperback edition, this is a classic.

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Review:

In Touching My Father's Soul Jamling Tenzing Norgay--son of sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who in company with Edmund Hillary made the first ascent to the summit of Everest in 1953--recounts his own experience of climbing the mountain with the 1996 IMAX expedition, and his spiritual quest for an understanding of how Everest has dominated the lives of both his father and himself.

I felt that only by following my father up the mountain, by standing where he stood, by climbing where he had climbed, could I truly learn about him. Only then would I be able to assemble all the missing parts of a father's life that a young man envisions and longs for but never formally inherits.

Jamling describes how his father's fame, and resulting fortune, liberated his children from the austere and insular life of the sherpa--the author travelled and was educated, in part, abroad--but also disconnected them from the social and spiritual certainties of that way of living. Writing after his father and mother had died, Jamling attempts to understand the meaning of their lives and their motivations.

This is a deeply personal book about one man's love for an absent father, and quest for a sense of shared identity, but Jamling is an equally astute commentator on the background to this intimate journey of self discovery. He examines the tensions between the Western, combative relationship with Everest, which drew the attention of the world to the mountain, and the sherpa relationship with the place they themselves know as Chomolungma. He traces the impact of the mountain "industry", the political and religious groups that tried to hijack his father's achievement, the controversy over "who was first?" and the difficulty in reconciling the Buddhism of the sherpas with the language of conquest and ambition.

Touching My Father's Soul is a spiritual, reflective work that seeks to reconcile the histories of one man, his family and his people with the immutable mystery of the mountain. --Alex Hankin

Review:

...insightful meditation on climbing, spirituality and life -- a breath-taking and inspiring view from the other side of the mountain. --David Breashears

Touching My Father's Soul rises above the bumper crop of books on Everest's tragic 1996 season. --Outside Magazine May 2001

There is much to marvel at in these page. It taught me a great deal....Enthralling to read. --Jon Krakauer

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