Rating: 
Summary: Good but not great
Review: This is a good book, but not a great one, undermined by three difficulties, not all of them the author's fault. Problem number one is an excess of hype on the part of the publisher; Lightner's interweaving of two stories, even if separated by more than 50 years, isn't revolutionary. It is entertaining, however, and it works nicely. It's just oversold.Nevertheless, the dual stories make the book. Lightner correctly realizes that his own climbing tale is simply too thin. His other main problem is that the World War II story is far more interesting, especially since most people have no clue about how the war was fought on Borneo. (My own reference library on World War II devotes two sentences to the island: the Japanese captured it; later the Allies took it back.) Lightner has done a wonderful job of bringing this little-known story to life, but by so doing, he emphasizes the thinness of his own tale, whose central conflict turns out to be between himself and the film crew who helped finance the expedition. The "video guys," as he calls them, want things in exchange for their money that change the nature of the climbers' goals. That's interesting...but not as much so as a world war. The third problem is that in his efforts to bring the story to life, Lightner's gone farther than needed, by fabricating dialog, characters' reactions to each other, and additional perceptual material to fill in gaps in the narrative. He admits this, but it's an ill-considered approach to a story with drama enough to stand on its own if he'd made it clear which material is based on someone's memoirs, and which is interpolated. Not doing it in the traditional manner leaves the reader wondering how much of the story is real, and how much is guesswork. Worse, it casts doubt on Lightner's own tale. Every time he intercuts from the present to the past, he does so by having himself reflect on the World War II story. The third time he did this, I wondered: Is this also a device? Might he have been napping at the time, rather than thinking about World War II? And if so, what else in the tale is a device? None of this destroys the versimilitude of the whole, but it does undermine it. But that said, it's a good book, recommended to those with an interest in adventure travel, history, and to a lesser extent, climbing.
Rating: 
Summary: Adventure plus painless history
Review: This is a great little book. I knew very little about climbing and found it facinating, but it was the history and research that this author shared with me that kept my attention. The book keeps shifting from the present expedition of climbing a long sought after peak in Borneo, to the expereinces of some Australian special forces that were dropped into the region in WWII to organize resistance of the natives against the Japanese. You will gain the feel of hiking through the jungle, and all the hazards and elements that must be endured. You will also gain a deep respect for the "backward" natives who thrive in the region. Their intelligence and values were quite impressive. Read this book!
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