Rating: 
Summary: Interesting tale but difficult read.
Review: This interesting story was lost to me in a tangle of technical writing and constant references to notes located at the back of the book. Granted, I am an armchair mountaineer and one who likes to be entertained by such books, but Kauffman did not keep me riveted as some similar stories have (Touching the Void, Into Thin Air).However, this is an interesting story and allows the reader to peer into some of the history of mountaineering.
Rating: 
Summary: A poorly written book!
Review: While "disaster" may be more usually applied to events which take the lives of more than the few people who climb mountains in any given expedition, the word seems well-applied to Weissner's 1939 expedition to K2. In light of more recent understanding about altitude sickness and the pernicious effects of "thin air" on rational function the description of this expedition's strategy for summitting and the sheer number of days members of this party spent at what we would now call killing altitudes boggles the mind. The 1939 K2 expedition remains a milestone in the mountaineering literature for the cautionary tale it represents. Reading about the differences between challenging a mountain then versus challenging a mountain now is fascinating. Especially interesting to me was the discussion of how only newly available information illuminates one of the critical controversies surrounding the expedition.
Rating: 
Summary: The anatomy of a famous disaster
Review: While "disaster" may be more usually applied to events which take the lives of more than the few people who climb mountains in any given expedition, the word seems well-applied to Weissner's 1939 expedition to K2. In light of more recent understanding about altitude sickness and the pernicious effects of "thin air" on rational function the description of this expedition's strategy for summitting and the sheer number of days members of this party spent at what we would now call killing altitudes boggles the mind. The 1939 K2 expedition remains a milestone in the mountaineering literature for the cautionary tale it represents. Reading about the differences between challenging a mountain then versus challenging a mountain now is fascinating. Especially interesting to me was the discussion of how only newly available information illuminates one of the critical controversies surrounding the expedition.
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