The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm
By Matt Dickinson
Times Books, $23
ISBN 0812931599

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The 1996 tragedy on Everest has been perhaps the most documented mountaineering tragedy of the modern era. It seems that everyone involved has written a book -- from Anatoli Bokreev's The Climb to Broughton Coburn's beautiful Everest: Mountain Without Mercy. Taken individually these books may appear to represent opportunism by the authors, but taken as a body of work they form a fascinating picture of what it was like to be on the mountain.

In Matt Dickinson's new book, The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm, he provides an interesting perspective from the North Face of Everest. Despite being on the other side of the mountain, the deaths on the South Face had a profound affect on the expeditions on the North Face. As Dickinson struggles to film a documentary, he is faced with the difficult question of whether or not to continue the ascent. The Other Side of Everest provides an additional angle through which to view the events during that fateful season.

Wes Breazeale is a writer living in Portland, Oregon, under the watchful gaze of Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens.