Postcards from the Ledge: Collected Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Child's tongue-in-cheek style is very much on display here in stories that reveal climbing's other face. His description of the daily habits of mountaineers on expedition (who don't bathe for months) is both disgusting and horrifyingly funny. A post-climb fiasco in the offices of petty Pakistani bureaucrats proves that not all epics take place on high mountain faces. Falling off a rock climb in front of his mother is an exercise in humility. Child takes up controversy with the same keen insight. His investigation of Tomo Cesen's claimed first ascent of Lhotse's south wall is considered the definitive report on this controversial event. A hard look at the media frenzy around the death of Alison Hargreaves on K2 evolves into a brilliant, impassioned defense of a friend. He also speaks out on the money and media-driven expeditions that now crowd Everest.

FROM THE CRITICS

Climbing magazine

A fantastic read

Publishers Weekly

Readers who can survive the funny but graphic first chapter on mountain climbers urinating, defecating, vomiting and coping with bugs, parasites and encrustations of frozen mucus will find the remainder of this book well worth pursuing. The 29 essays included are reworkings of pieces that Child (Thin Air) wrote for Climbing and Outside magazines. They range from accounts of the detritus left on the summits of the world's highest peaks to the furious controversies about two spectacular climbs that some skeptics doubt even took place, although, in one case, the skepticism about a woman's solo ascent of Mt. Everest seems to have resulted from blatant sexism. There are stories of heroism; a tale of tragedy on K2; a picture of the old Tibet, which is being rebuilt by its Chinese conquerors, who, Child reports, are replacing antique treasures with "tumble-down concrete schlock"; and, of course, the author's adventures as he climbed peaks from his native Australia to Europe, Asia and the Americas, the whole enlivened by his civilized wit. For those put off by the coarseness of some of the writing, Child warns us at the outset that language is the "first casualty in the slide toward savagery." 25 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A solid collection of the authorþs mountain-climbing journalism, for which he is widely known. Australian climber/writer Child is a man without fear, as these pages reveal, and without much regard for the normal niceties. He writes at length, and with obvious pleasure, about getting sick in snowbanks and on mongrel Tibetan dogs, of various bodily functions at various altitudes. All for good reason, he suggests: þMountains turn mountaineers into Neanderthals. Table manners do not exist on expeditions. Talk is a patois of crude grunts, deranged utterances, and schoolboyish sexual innuendo.þ Readers with delicate sensibilities will want to shy away from this book, for Child is a faithful reporter of these climbing realities. In more somber and sober moments, however, he writes affectingly of the thrill of climbing the worldþs great peaks. Along the way, he looks at several of his colleagues in the business of scaling mountains, and his profiles of todayþs leading alpinists are uniformly well wrought. Some of those climbers, he writes, are ethically and socially challenged; others are so overwhelmingly fixated on their chosen sport that they cannot function without pitons in hand. And many others, Child writes, are now dead, the victims of some misjudgment or another. He supplies his readers with helpful hints on how to avoid such miscalculations themselves. Usefully, for instance, he observes that "sitting on cold ledges gives you hemorrhoids. It is not widely known, but many climbers have failed to reach summits due to this undignified condition" (to avoid falling victim to it, he adds, you should bring along a foam sleeping pad). Veteran readers ofClimbing magazine, from which most of these pieces are taken, will be glad to have Childþs occasional journalism in book form. (25 b&w photos)