Dark Shadows Falling.

Simpson, Joe

ISBN 10: 0898865492 / ISBN 13: 9780898865493

Published by The Mountaineers, Seattle, Washington, 1997

About this Item

First U.S. Edition./First Printing. Hardcover. 208 pages, with full-color photographs. A passionate and moving story of climbers and their mountains. There is a small dig/tear to the first 12 pages, on the bottom, and it even is on the front pastedown. Some edgewear to the extremities. Bump to the spine bottom. Still a very good, unread copy. From my smoke-free collection.

Seller Inventory # 3851

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dark Shadows Falling.
• Publisher: The Mountaineers, Seattle, Washington
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0898865492
• ISBN 13: 9780898865493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mountain Climbing

About this title

Synopsis

* Concise, objective account of the 1996 Everest debacle
* One of Simpson's most controversial and challenging books
* Short listed for the 1997 Boardman Tasker Award

In 1992, an Indian climber was left to die alone high on the South Col of Mount Everest by other climbers who watched his feebly waving hand from the security of their tent thirty yards away. Some film footage of his corpse was later shown on television. Why did these onlookers not hold the dying man's hand and comfort him? The answer appalls Joe Simpson, who was himself left for dead in a crevasse at the foot of Siula Grande in Peru in 1985.

It is an uncomfortable ethical question that he is forced to confront as he attempts a difficult new route on Pumori, with a clear view of the whole South Col from close to the vantage point where Eric Shipton first spotted the way up the south side of Everest taken by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. Now that Everest has become the playground of the rich, where commercial operators offer guided tours to the top up fixed ropes, camping amidst the detritus and unburied corpses of previous less fortunate climbers, Simpson wonders if the noble, caring instincts that once characterized mountaineering have been irrevocably displaced as in other facets of today's society.

On investigation, he finds it a less black and white issue that at first it seemed. "I shall never forget the horror of dying alone, the awful empty loneliness of it," he says. Yet his empathy for the victims of storms, altitude sickness, or misjudgments, is tested time and again as he explores anecdotally and in conversations with his companions on Pumori, the moral climate of mountaineering in the 1990s.

About the Author

JOE SIMPSON is the author of the bestselling Touching the Void, as well as four subsequent non-fiction books published by The Mountaineers Books: This Game of Ghosts, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, and The Beckoning Silence. The Beckoning Silence won the 2003 National Outdoor Book Award. The other three published by The Mountaineers Books were all shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award.