Book Reviews

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Book Reviews EDITED BY GALEN A. ROWELL

Climbing in North America, by Chris Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press for the American Alpine Club, 1976. 392 pages, 200 photographs, $14.95. Climbing in North America is about pushing back the “limits of the possible,” about men inventing a sport as they went, about the process by which “It’ll never be climbed” has become the most disproved phrase in the mountaineer’s lexicon. The history of climbing is a history of separated groups, making parallel progress on related problems, often with little communication between them. This is the way Jones treats North American climbing. The parochial is stressed. Jones shifts focus between the different regional climbing communities, the major problems as they are solved, and the various strong individuals who have stepped out front, in one region or another, to advance the sport. This makes for a good deal of backing and filling, and a certain amount of confusion on the way. Jones doesn’t deal much with climbers who merely accumulated large numbers of first ascents, or with explorers, trappers, or traders who first travelled in the American mountains. His interest is in the men who created new horizons by bringing in new equipment or techniques, or by demonstrating virtuosity beyond their contemporaries. SalathC, Kor, Durrance, Robbins, Leonard, Harding, and Underhill are the kind of heroes Jones has, especially Underhi!l. Robbins (whom he seems not to like), Kor, Durrance, and Harding for sheer athletic ability, and for competitiveness, courage, and accomplishment. SalathC for his hard steel pitons and his eccentricity. Leonard for the dynamic belay. And Underhill for his magis:erial presence, his zeal in bringing European techniques to America, for cross-pollinating the different scenes in California, the East, Canada, and the Tetons, and for declaiming a mountaineering aesthetic from the editorial seat of Appalachia. This cross-pollination was rare enough, for on this big continent, whose mountains, as Hemingway wrote, “are too far away,” there was for a long time little enough exchange among the disparate groups. Coloradoans, Californians, or Appalachian Mountain Club members could easily carry on, and did, in the belief that they alone were at the forefront of American progress on steep ground. That, until the 1960s American climbing lagged behind the Europeans bothered few 294

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on this continent, though some looked to Europe for models of how to advance in rope-nandling, etc., and bothers Jones hardly at all. When the breakthrough came, with the Everest traverse of 1963 and American firsts on the Drus (both are treated here in only a few sentences), it was so dramatic that even the French had to admit American supremacy. That until the 1960s the lack of knowledge of each others’ activities or abilities didn’t hamper people in different regions from working on similar problems (in fact, it must have inspired them!), from pushing on the limits to the possible, is a testament to the genius of place, and to the individualism that characterizes mountain sports. Periods of communication-like Underhill’s, and like the 196Oswere periods of rapid change. For this reason, one of Climbing in North America’s sadder failures is the short shrift given the Tenth Mountain Division, that unprecedented aggregation of top mountaineers from all over. Judging from the veterans I have met, I would have to guess it created some of the strongest bonds ever forged between climbers from different parts of the U.S. and contributed not insignificantly to the growth of the sport in post-World War II years. Jones sees American mountaineering divided not only geographically, but in terms of the preferred problems, as well. Alpinists are distinct from rock climbers; they are the ones who assault major summits using expedition-type techniques. Theirs is, of course, the classic mountaineering handed down from Saussure, and Mallory, and the Europeans and AMC climbers who came to the Canadian Rockies in the 1880s and 1890s to conduct summers-long programs of exploration and conquest. Alpinism in North America has been associated with the Northwest, Alaska, the Tetons, the Canadian Rockies (especially), and usually snow and ice. Rock climbers concentrate on more rarified problems in places like Yosemite, the Shawangunks, and outcrops, canyons, and spires all over. Of late-since 1960 or so-as the big mountains have fallen, the rock men’s technical and technological advances have begun to be applied to the mountains’ faces; the big-wall climbing pioneered by Robbins, Harding and others in Yosemite have represented an intermediate sort of mountaineering. Even these technically distinguished scenes have had subscenes, usually organized around the personalities involved. The growth in any of the scenes has been an affair of quantum leaps, not steady progress. Some genius will raise the ante, and raise it again in his group, then growth will even off for a number of years. Somewhere else, another genius will be climbing the unclimbable while people in the first area are content to repeat old routes. Yosemite, for example, saw major new climbs after the dynamic belay was brought in by Leonard, Brower, Bedayn, et al., but (in Jones’ eyes) saw no very great activity through the 19.50s. The Mountaineers’ handbook on travel on Rainier, circa 1932, Jones lays out for the readers’ laughter; it is an ironic exam-

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ple of the moribund on a mountain that had seen a number of heroic ascents in earlier years. Out of such a complicated history, Jones has made a readable book. It is anecdotal when at its best, with short summations of some of the major personalities, and an acute, if too seldom indulged, sense of what it is like in a climbers’ camp: [In the Tetons, ca. 19571 there was by no means a flood of climbers, for there were seldom more than twenty residents in camp at any one time. If newcomers arrived disgorging ropes and boots from their car, they were soon surrounded by the residents. The climbing community was so small that they would either know them personally or at least have some acquaintance in common. Before long a pot of tea was on the boil, and everyone got in on the latest news and rumor: A party was overdue on the north ridge; Mount Robson was yet to be climbed that year and conditions were reckoned to be awful . . . and the guy in campsite twelve was just back from the Alps and selling off European gear. But in such a short work on such a big subject, even the most important climbs can get only cursory treatment, and one begins to tire of the repeated assurances that the climb just described was the greatest to its day. There is a good, clear treatment of the Cook Hoax on Mount McKinley, and a dramatic retelling of MacCarthy’s epic on Mount Logan; when the narrative is good, it carries the reader along. As the history comes forward in time, there is growing detail on the people and their accomplishments, with the fullest treatment given to the post-World War II decades. A mountaineering library will not now be complete without Climbing in North America, and as a link between more detailed local histories and more specific books on specific climbs, it is a good tool. But this reader was left wanting more of it: a social history of climbing (what are the climbers’ backgrounds? What did they do after giving up climbing?), and a treatment of American climbing in the world context (how are our greats, men and mountains, regarded in Europe? HOW have American techniques been exported to places like Mont Blanc, or parallel methods used there?). BRUCE COLMAN Everest-The Hard Way, by Chris Bonington, London: Stoughton, 1976. 238 pages, 80 color pictures.

Hodder

and

Bonington has pulled it off. He has produced a book in the grand but tedious tradition of expedition literature that is highly readable, wellpaced, and anything but stuffy. His enthusiasm for Everest is so cap-

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tivating and lucidly conveyed that most readers will no longer question why Barclay’s Bank put up a quarter of a million dollars for the trip, nor why men risked their lives-and in one case died-to reach the summit. The American edition of Hard Way is smaller and more poorly reproduced than the lavishly illustrated 7-x-lo-inch British edition. If you are a book collector it would be well worth buying one from England. Bonington has profited from his previous Everest book, The Ultimate Challenge, which described an earlier southwest face attempt. That book has enabled him to neatly summarize what went before with no writer’s compulsion to lay it out for once and for all in great detail. The by-nowfamiliar Everest trek is seen freshly through the diary excerpts of Everest first-timer Peter Boardman, rather than wholly through the eyes of thirdtimer Bonington. And the book has the flavor of success: no need to dwell too long on hardships. Somehow, difficult climbing is presented matter-of-factly, yet in a way that leaves no doubt as to the skill and effort expended. The summit was reached only a month after establishing Base Camp. These fast-moving days are expanded by information that makes the summit climbers seem human compared to the supermen of old Everest sagas who had noble thoughts, never swore, never shat, and never reached the summit. This is a book every serious mountaineer must own. It is the best and the most important major expedition account to come out of Britain in the past decade. It also carries that highly unreadable but occasionally invaluable anachronism, a technical appendix more than half the length of the text. GALEN

ROWELL

Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, by Sir Edmund Hillary. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1975. 319 pages, 24 black and white and 8 color plates, sketch maps. Price: $12.95 What more can be said about Hillary? What more can even he himself say? Not the greatest climber of all times or even of our times, as he takes pains to point out in this autobiography, he is indisputably the most celebrated. Yet he was a virtual unknown even in mountaineering circles before 1953, and some would say that he achieved fame greatly out of proportion to his actual record in the mountains. The fact that he was ready and performed superbly when his opportunity came is often ignored; still, if ever there was a life dominated by one event, it is Hillary’s. Born just after World War I, Hillary was of prime age to become cannon fodder in World War II. But a strong leaning toward pacifismand the needs of his family’s small farm near Auckland-kept him out of service until the last two years, when he entered the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Like so many who are attracted to climbing, he was strong

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and hyperactive in his youth, and while in the air force used all his leaves for scaling alpine peaks in New Zealand and jungle peaks in the South Pacific. He was severely burned in a boating accident in the Solomons, but recovered quickly and returned to the family farm (really a beekeeping business) after the war. During the next several years he found time in the New Zealand winters, while the bees hibernated, to climb dozens of peaks in his own country, and finally in 1950 managed a trip to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. Having no contacts with climbers there nor little knowledge of the terrain, he and two others from New Zealand managed only a few modest climbs of more or less standard routes. Hillary was then past thirty, yet by his own account was still a provincial farm boy-unaccustomed to the most rudimentary conventions of international travel, living on a small income, not particularly well educated, and with practically no prospects for breaking into the world of big-time climbing. His most notable ascent up to this time had been a new route on New Zealand’s Mount Cook, all of 12,349 feet (“but it’s all mountain,” says Galen Rowe11 after a recent trip there; “in terms of relief and the scale of its glaciers, it may be the biggest 12,000-foot mountain in the world”). Would anyone have then predicted that only three years later Hillary would be the first to set foot on the summit of Everest? “One of our few indisputable modern heroes,” he is called on the dustjacket of this book. One of the most improbable of all times, we might add. Just how he got from Cook to Everest is a remarkably simple story, the way Hillary tells it. It begins with a low-budget expedition to Mukut Parbat which was the first all-New Zealand party to climb in the Himalayas and was largely self-financed. They succeeded on that and several other 6000-meter peaks. In the same year Hillary and one other of the group arranged to join Shipton’s post-monsoon reconnaissance of Everest. Very fit and totally acclimated, possessed of more than sufficient technique and general mountaineering sense for that kind of climbing, Hillary did well and was invited on succeeding British trips to Everest. Then, at 11: 30 of a fine morning, there he was with Tenzing, eating a Mint Cake at the top of the world. What followed this test of Hillary’s mental and physical strength was a test of his character: would instant, worldwide fame, the embraces and awards of kings and presidents, turn his head? What to do for an encore? There were many more trips to Nepal, of course, and there were family excursions to exotic places on behalf of Sears Roebuck to promote the sale of camping equipment; but the most important exploit other than Everest was to drive a farm tractor up and down the glaciers and mountains of Antarctica to the South Pole. Had it not been for his climb of Everest, nothing that he has done since then would rate more than a footnote in climbing histories. Far more important in a cosmic sense has

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been his continued, direct assistance to the Sherpas of Nepal: bridges, schools, a huge national park around Everest, an airfield or two, and doubtless much good advice concerning how to avoid exploitation by hordes of manic foreigners. Hillary is a good writer, an apparently honest and genuinely modest man, but this is not his best book. Perhaps he was told by a well-meaning publisher to write so many words and no more, because the informing detail is absent, we are given a life in outline, not in depth. He and all the other characters are two-dimensional, lacking in fears, desires, hostilities, with little sense of purpose or even of humor. Ken Wilson’s interview with Hillary in Mountain 45 and 46 gives a much more intimate picture of the man, his values and opinions; much of this book reads like warmed over abridgments of stories that first appeared in his 1955 book, High Adventure. Photos and maps are adequate and the price is right. GRANT BARNES

Higher than Everest by Major H.P.S. Ahluwalia, 1973: Vikas Publishing House, Pvt. Ltd., 5 Ansari Road, New Delhi 110002, India. Forward by Indira Gandhi. (Hardback published I973 with black-and-white photos and drawings; paperback published 1976 for Rs 6.50 with drawings.) The year 1964 was a big year for H.P.S. Ahluwalia. He finished his education at the Indian Army’s College of Military Engineering; he got engaged; he climbed Mount Everest; then was feted as a national. sports hero; he served in combat against Pathan guerillas in the Sind valley of Kashmir during that year’s war against Pakistan; he was shot by a sniper and lost the use of his arms and legs as a result. He never saw so rapid and heady a succession of events again, but somehow the years that followed were bigger, fuller years. Cut off from the mountains of the land he had loved all his life, he turned to roam among the mountains of the spirit. Tentatively at first, from his hospital bed, he probed them as he had poked through the Kumaon hills as a boy. He found the same range of feelings: exhilaration, challenge and joy in movement and discovery. Better, he found the same call to a peak a little bit higher, a valley a little bit beyond the one he had just reached. So he climbed and grew, as he had climbed and grown before, and he lived, as he had never ceased to do. Along the way, he regained the use of his hands, put hospitals behind him and learned new skills to replace those lost to him. Emotionally and intellectually he had never lost his independence; physically, he regained it step by step until at last he was able to return to full-time duty and, in 1974, to marry. Ahluwalia writes as one suspects he has always lived: quietly, confidently and unpretentiously. His story is beautiful because it is human. He is strong, but not invincible; optimistic, but not blindly so, traits

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which make the quality of his success greater. The chapters on the Everest expedition are important, because one climbs as one lives, and interesting, because the Indian mountaineers have evolved an expedition style which is, though vaguely British in form, uniquely their own in substance. And on what other expedition could a summit party of three properly leave icons of Guru Nanak, the Dalai Lama and Durga in harmony? But the book is really the story of Hari Ahluwalia, born in the hills, to whom not even a wheelchair and a desk at the Ministry of Munitions can deny a life of summits and secrets. ANDREW

HARVARD

Pamir, by FranGois Valla and Jean-Paul Zuanon; 300 pages text, pictures, maps, and drawings; in French; Imprimerie Sogirep-38420 Domene; cloth bound. Pamir is a book compiled by Franqois Valla and Jean-Paul Zuanon, two of the nine-member team from Grenoble representing France during the 1974 International Climbing Camp sponsored by the Russian Sports Federation. The 185 participants from ten nations, who assembled in the Valley of Edelweiss beneath the “celestial mountains,” received world press coverage because of the several tragic deaths which occurred during periods of earthquake and storm. The French account represents one set of impressions among many, but not greatly different from those of the American climbers. The stated purpose of the book is to provide background and insight-both for mountaineers and armchair adventurerson these remote and hitherto relatively unexplored (at least by foreigners) mountains, and on the particular events surrounding the summer’s climbing. The text, well interspersed with black and white pictures and maps, achieves this end. At least half the book is devoted to detailed descriptions of the geography, flora, fauna, and way of life of the Kirghizian peoples native to the area. Woven into this section is a bit of history, the Russian attitude toward mountaineering, and even some political considerations of the region-concluded by a complete bibliography of these subjects. Thus the reader is provided with what is probably the best existing “textbook” on the Pamir, and for that alone it would be nice to have an English translation. The half of the book which describes the various climbs which the French made, as well as their encounters with and impressions of climbers from other nations, provides a sense of the physical and emotional climate pervading the disparate efforts of the differing climbing clubs. Except for two passages, this section has alternate chapters by the two authors, which makes for a contrast and interesting balance between the objective and informative reporting style of Zuanon-the political scientist-and the more emotional, passionate, psychological probing of Valla-the globe

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trotting avalanche specialist. Errors of specific facts surrounding some events can be forgiven under the circumstances. This reviewer spent several days at 7000 meters with Valla, for example, and his direct quotes do not quite match my journal account. But then my French at that altitude was probably lacking at best ! Neither of these men is afraid to express his opinion of how and why events turned out as they did. One of the recurring themes, especially in Valla’s accounts, is the way in which they feel attitude adversely affects the emotions and reasoning capabilities of climbers, including themselves. Perhaps this theme is best summarized in the book’s dedication to those who died, which made specific mention of Gary Ullin, referring to them as “victims of their passion for the mountain.” An important value in having the book is that it is timeless in its capturing some of the essence of expeditioning and of different nations’ approach to it. One comes away wishing that on the shelf next to Parnir were accounts of the same summer written by the Russian, Japanese, Dutch, etc., SO that one could have the mountaineering equivalent of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” J.E. WILLIAMSON The Clirnhcr’s Guide to the High Sierra, by Steve Roper. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1976. 380 pages, 11 photographs, $7.95 Steve Roper has produced the first Sierra guide with information on modern rock climbs and difficult mountaineering routes. It is written in the same style as his earlier Yosemite guidebook, but with a few important differences. The earlier book covered a seven-square-mile valley; this one attempts thousands of square miles of wilderness. The earlier book was based on nearly complete cooperation of climbers who made first ascents; this one covers areas where certain climbers have felt a moral obligation to keep their routes unpublished. The earlier book was based on a fine previous edition by the same author; this one fills a gap left by the 1972 Smatko edition. That book should never have been published, but since the majority of complaints with the manuscript had to do with technical climbs. a snap decision was made: amputate the diseased parts and print a grotesque torso devoid of all fifth and sixth class routes. Roper’s original task was to write a separate technical guide, but soon after publication of the Smatko guide it became apparent that the malignancy had not been confined to that book’s extremities. It had a cancerous growth of several hundred new mountainsall, it seemed, first ascended by the guide’s editor. Roper was asked to rewrite the whole book. The result is one of the fattest of the Sierra Club Totebooks, but one that is frequently criticized for descriptions that are too lean. It is impossible to please everyone, or even a majority, with a guidebook these days.

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The new guide is a cold collection of facts with the exception of the superbly written historical chapter introductions. Many climbers are unhappy with the exceedingly brief descriptions. Most full-day or multiday climbs are described with only a sentence or two, making it hard to locate the routes or even to discover where they start. Roper began the task with two conflicting emotions: one, to do a thorough job on the guide; two, to respect the wishes of those who did not wish to provide information about their routes and were essentially “anti-guidebook.” In the Tuolumne Meadows region, for example, about one-fourth of the routes are not written up in the guide. Some new owners of the guide have cynically commented that Roper must be a closet member of the “anti-guidebook” set. A week in the Sierra with the guide, unable to locate any routes, makes them consider tennis in a new light. These criticisms are precisely the opposite of those commonly leveled at Beckey’s Cascade Guide, which allegedly tells too much and lures people to the mountains with encyclopedic information about every route accompanied by detailed maps and photos. My own emotions are mixed. I sympathize with the desire to protect the mountains by not advertising them in a guidebook; I also want a guide to contain enough information to enable me to locate and climb each route, given the physical ability and the weather. I am highly suspicious of any movement that tries to restrict the use of language. Overall, I find the new Sierra guide a frustratingly sparse but generally concise, accurate, and valuable document. I will never “tote” it in the mountains, but I will always read it before visiting a new area. It is the only modern book with the who, what, when and where of Sierra mountaineering. GALEN

ROWELL

High Odyssey: The first solo winter assault of Mount Whitney and the Muir Trail area, by Eugene Rose. Berkeley: Howell-North, 1974. 160 pages, many photographs. $5.95 In 1929 a young stream gauger for the Southern California Edison power company decided to ski the entire length of the southern Sierra Nevada-nearly 300 miles. Orland Bartholomew spent three months in the mountains on heavy wood skis with hoe handles for poles and became the first man to traverse the range in winter. Rose is a Fresno newspaperman and his prose is only slightly better than the average news article on climbing. We learn that Bartholomew shunned publicity; then we learn that he tried hard to interest magazines, newspapers, and a tourist association in his feat, but failed. We learn that three modern ski tourers at a California lecture claimed to have made the first ski traverse of the Sierra and that prompted the author to write the book to make the truth known; this reviewer interviewed

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one of those modern tourers and found that they had not claimed the first Muir Trail ski traverse, were aware of Bartholomew and had deep respect for him, and told those facts to the author. Naturally, this knowledge tainted my reading of the book. Bartholomew’s lonely ski trek is an intriguing tale well worth’ knowing. It is illustrated with his photos, and they are of surprisingly high quality. One wishes that Bartholomew himself had left more than the published account he wrote for the 1930 Sierra Club Bdlefin. In that account Bartholomew makes a passing reference to hearing wolves and finding tracks, but Rose blows it up into something that “apparently disproved some authorities who had never recognized the presence of wolves in this range.” Bartholomew was a Forest Ranger in the Sequoia region for two decades, but the definitive book on fauna of that area, “Birds and Mammals of the High Sierra,” states that the last definite wolf sighting in Sequoia was in 1908 and that “certainly they are now extinct.” Bartholomew was a keen observer of wildlife and it would be interesting to know if he really did find wolves in 1929. Why did the Sequoia authorities overlook his claim? And why does Rose now present it so assuredly, yet so vaguely? High Odyssey is a book for the specialist in mountain literature, wilderness skiing, or Sierra lore. The author’s interpretations of facts are often questionable. A far more valuable document could have been published by editing and annotating Bartholomew’s original diary, parts of which are’ excerpted on the final two pages of the book. Together with his remarkable photographs, this would have been a most interesting record of a journey that could be interpreted by others with special knowledge that this author lacks. If my information is correct, only three parties have skied the length of the Sierra crest that parallels the John Muir Trail. All three have done it during winters of exceptionally low snowfall: 1929, 1970, and 1972. In heavy winters the Sierra can be dangerous for weeks on end. The open slopes above timberline become exceedingly avalanche-prone. Bartholomew was, as Rose indicates, a highly motivated man before his time. In 1929 on the Sierra crest, he was also a man in the right place at the right time, which is a large part of why his solo jaunt has yet to be repeated. GALEN

ROWELL

The Climber’s Sourcebook, by Anne and Steven Schneider, New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1976. 340 pages, many photos, $4.95 This is the book that many people have dreaded for years. It tells where to learn to climb, where to buy equipment, where to climb, and where to obtain media materials on climbing. Luckily, it is neither complete

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nor accurate. Even the rankest beginner should be able to sort out truth from the authors’ rude opinions and glaring omissions. The reader learns that Reinhold Messner is “not exactly the sort of fellow one might wish as part of one’s rope team;” that nine businesses and two individuals supply mountain slide shows in the United States: that clubs seem to have become an integral part of the climbing scene; that the AAC runs several huts; that anyone wishing to use the AAC library should phone a week in advance; that Fiberfill II and Polarguard are for “extreme cold-weather-bound” climbers as well as for wet climates; that “climbing without a helmet is only an admission of poor climbing judgment;” that clean climbing is the most important development in American mountaineering in the last decade; that for $3.00 from Gross Industries Inc. one may purchase the ultimate equal rights device: “a strange white plastic gismo that . . . permits women to stand up while urinating;” that “starch-based, preservative-, and additive-loaded prepackaged foods . . . can help wear down even the most well-conditioned climber;” that the AAJ covers “international climbing productivity of sanctioned AAC climbs and climbers:” and that AAJ articles are “devoid of personal feeling.” Enough said. GALEN

ROWELL

Mountain Care for Mountain Climbers, by Peter Steele. London: W. Heinemann Medical Books, Ltd., 1976. 220 pages with illustrations. Price $8.00. When I was in medical school, my fellow students and I always sought British texts because of their authors’ ability to present technical material with clarity, cogency and understated wit. For the same reasons, Peter Steele’s book is to be recommended from among the several nowavailable on the medical problems of mountaineers. Dr. Steele is most qualified to undertake the heroic (some might even say reckless) task of single authorship of so vast a topic. He has climbed on several continents, served as physician to the 1971 International Mount Everest Expedition, and in 1967 spent five months trekking across Bhutan with his wife and their two toddlers. Among the book’s many virtues, chief is its directness in language, structure and instruction. It is written for the layman who, if intelligent, will have no difficulty in understanding or using it. Injuries are presented in the order in which they represent a threat to life. Pertinent anatomy and physiology are judiciously explained in lucid, vernacular English. The discussion of each problem is immediately followed by a section entitled “act” which tells the surrogate physician how to proceed. The illustrations are helpful. Traumatic injuries, appropriately,

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occupy about two-thirds of the book; the remainder covers medical problems, altitude, frost-bite, overseas travel and emergency preparations. The book easily fits a parka pocket and belongs there. A single medical author inevitably produces some opinions to which his colleagues will take exception. For the most part, these differences are minor and need not concern the lay reader. However, a comparison of this British book to American books on the subject is worthwhile for several reasons. First, the areas of discrepant opinion should display themselves. Second, much additional knowledge may be gained or retained thereby. Finally it becomes incontestable that the British remain the masters of the language. STEPHEN S. ARNON,

M.D.

Mountain Medicirle-A Clinical Study of Cold and High Altitude, by Michael Ward M.D., F.R.C.S. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975. 376 pages. f: 10.00. This book is a well researched, well written, concise summary of the physiology and pathophysiology of man’s exposure to altitude and cold. Dr. Ward has provided us with a book that is both an understandable introduction for the interested non-medical mountaineer, and a comprehensive reference survey of research in these areas for those wishing to review the subject or explore some topics further. No mean feat. While not intended as a text book of mountain first-aid, it does provide clinical information that would be of value in treatment of highaltitude, cold-related illness and in areas such as equipment selection and design. It is a highly readable and recommended source book for those interested in the medical and physiological aspects of mountaineering. Unfortunately, as with most scientific texts, it is already four years behind and hence lacks pertinent information on recent work on acclimatization. cerebral edema, and some of the latest thinking on therapy of acute mountain sickness. If Dr. Ward can find time in his busy surgical and teaching practice, we will look forward to a revised edition. GILBERT

ROBERTS, JR. M.D.