Storms of Silence - Softcover

Simpson, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898865123 ISBN 13: 9780898865127

Publisher: Mountaineers Books, 1997

Synopsis

In Storms of Silence Joe Simpson brings up to date, in the vivid anecdotal style of This Game of Ghosts, his thoughtful, funny and moving account of his maverick life as a mountaineer. But behind the rich tapestry of adventures lies a dark and brooding disquiet.
He recalls the terrifying avalanche that nearly wiped out his base camp during an attempt on the unclimbed north face of Gangchempo in the Himalaya. While climbing on Cho Oyo he meets a band of Khampas, including a four-year-old boy, fleeing over the high Nangpa La pass from the brutality of Chinese oppression in Tibet. Joe's love of Himalayan life contrasts with the ruthless Chinese destruction of the Tibetan culture and people. A violent brush with a skinhead in his home town of Sheffield is mirrored in his chilling encounter with the Peruvian police. On Huascaran, Peru's highest mountain, he hears unnerving ghostly voices and learns of the earthquake which buried 18,000 people and wiped out the town of Yungay below him. It reminds him of his boyhood visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen. The book ends with the trauma of reliving, in quite unexpected circumstances, the dance with death he described so vividly in his bestselling book Touching the Void.

About this title

Review:

"Excellent...Simpson is a born writer" (The Times)

"'To mix a metaphor, Joe Simpson is a streetwise mountaineer...He takes you close to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts of professional climbing in the 1990's. He is used to dealing with totalitarian policemen. He is passionate and moving on the subject of Tibet and the agonies inflicted on it by the cruel Chinese occupation...Above all, Simpson is a born writer'" (Paul Johnson The Times)

"'The book's major theme is the nature of aggression. A skinhead in a Sheffield bar sets the reader up for the genocide that is modern Tibetan history...What makes Joe Simpson stand out is his belief that there is more to life than a crampon, and his dogged refusal to leave the highest mental peaks unclimbed'" (Sara Wheeler Daily Telegraph)

"'THis immensely accessible book offers a unique re-interpretation of masculinity...In doing so, it offers a ray of hope to an increasingly bleak and vicious society'" (Martin Booth Independent)

About the Author:

Joe Simpson is the author of several best-selling books, of which the first, Touching the Void, won both the NCR Award and the Boardman Tasker Award. Touching the Void has become a classic and an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages and made into an award-winning feature-length documentary film (winner of the Outstanding British Film of the Year BAFTA 2004). Joe currently lives in Sheffield.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mountaineers Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0898865123
• ISBN 13: 9780898865127
• Binding: Paperback