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Review by Alden Mudge
It wasn't just the ill-fated commercial climbing expeditions led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer that were on Mt. Everest during the very un-merry month of May last year. Also there was an IMAX filming expedition led by mountaineer/cinematographer David Breashears.
Lucky thing. When disaster struck, Breashears, who has participated in ten Everest attempts and has won four Emmy awards for filmmaking, selflessly contributed supplies to the rescue effort from his expedition's own depleted resources, and he and his team helped save the lives of injured climbers and retrieve the bodies of the dead, at considerable risk to themselves.
Those heroic rescue efforts -- including a marvelous description of a daring helicopter evacuation at extreme altitude -- are the dramatic centerpiece of "Everest: Mountain Without Mercy," Broughton Coburn's account of the IMAX expedition. But Coburn, who has spent much of the last two decades living in and writing about Nepal and the Himalaya, offers a wider view of Everest and the people who live in its shadow than is found in "Into Thin Air," Jon Krakauer's recent riveting account of the disaster. "Everest: Mountain Without Mercy" chronicles the filmmakers' two-year effort to document Everest for the first time in the extraordinary large format of IMAX films. More important, Coburn presents the mountain fully, in its cultural, spiritual and geographical contexts.
Among the chief pleasures of the book are a series of sidebar articles written by experts and participants involved with the expedition. Geologist Roger Bilham, for example, writes a fascinating account of the difficulties in calculating the precise height of Everest (due in part to the fact that the Himalaya exert their own gravitational pull, making it difficult to determine the true geoid -- "the theoretical extension of sea level beneath the mountains"). Sherpa Jamling Tenzing Norgay, attempting his first Everest climb during this expedition, writes about following in the footsteps of his famous father, Tenzing Norgay, who reached the summit with Edmund Hillary during the first ascent in 1953. And Seaborn "Beck" Weathers offers his dramatic first-person account of his ordeal and amazing survival during last year's disaster, an account which, by the way, takes a gentle poke at Krakauer.
But what is sure to impress readers most about "Everest: Mountain Without Mercy" is the power and brilliance of its images, characteristics we have come to expect from the National Geographic Society publications. Beautifully designed, with 100 full-color photographs, at least 40 of which are frames from the upcoming IMAX movie, "Everest: Mountain Without Mercy" offers mere low-land mortals an almost intimate sense of Everest's terrible beauty and soaring majesty.
Alden Mudge is the 1997 president of the San Francisco chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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