Touching My Father's Soul: In the Footsteps of Tenzing Norgay - Hardcover

Norgay, Jamling Tenzing; Coburn, Broughton

3.98

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9780712605816: Touching My Father's Soul: In the Footsteps of Tenzing Norgay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0712605819 ISBN 13: 9780712605816

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2001

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A book of wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, as much as adventure, To uching My Father's Soul recounts Tenzing's son, Jamling Norgay's, trea cherous climb to the world's most forbidding summit on the 1996 IMAX c limbing expedition, which collided with tragedy, as retold in Karkenauer's Into Thin Air. 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, but so too is an understanding of his family's Sherpa history and a realisation of the power and significance of the Himalayas. A dramatic and beautifully written route to a closer understanding of the spiritual significance of the Himalayas and the ancient Sherpa dynasties. At heart, a climb to the soul of Tibstand Buddhism.

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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:

Tenzing Norgay, who conquered Everest in 1953 with Sir Edmund Hillary, emotionally dismayed his son by saying he climbed the mountain "so that you wouldn't have to". Yet following in his father's footsteps was to be Jamling's way of gaining a rounded picture of his distant and now departed parent, even though a Buddhist monk's divination did not bode well for the 1996 Everest climbing season. Encounters with terrible tragedy but also triumph were in store for the Imax filming expedition of which he was a crucial part. Working with a co-author, Broughton Coburn, he reveals much about the Sherpa way of life and death, the climbing history of Everest, the mountain's wrath and the extraordinary manner in which he reaches reconciliation with his dead father atop the summit. Both as spiritual quest and physical challenge, this is Everest from a very different Sherpa perspective and makes remarkable and rewarding reading.

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