Rating: 
Summary: A Good Read and A Great Mountaineering Story
Review: "Snow" is an outstanding achievement----well written, beautifully illustrated, and meticulously edited. Ed made alive the routine of expeditions. This is a great read for the non-climber and essential for novice mountaineers and those stepping up to the expedition arena. I have not seen another book that so accurately describes the discipline and careful thought that goes into successful and safe climbing. Beyond the technical details, Ed reveals himself--- letting others know what motivates elite climbers to risk everything for climbing success. In an age when Americans seem to most value the things they own, it is refreshing to read of a life that most values experience. I am a better person for having learned Ed's struggles and successes.George B. Allen
Author of "Ultrasafe-A Guide to Safer Rock Climbing"
Rating:
Summary: Chomolungma /Everest Are The Same The 1st Is A Mindset Too
Review: "The Goddess Mother of the World", This original local name for Mt. Everest should be placed at the center of the experience in order to safely spend time on the flanks of this great mountain. Those who adopt the name Chomolungma also adopt and respect the History, Cultures, and Religions that are an integral part of their journey to these rarified heights. These mountaineers challenge themselves and place their lives in the hands of fate and those they climb with, and in turn accept responsibility for the safety of their team members.
American Mountaneer Ed Webster and the men and woman like him climb neither for profit nor pay, and while they accept the danger that is inherent in what they pursue, they always work to minimize the risk. These climbers do not involve themselves with stunts, nor do they bring people to this mountain that have no business being there. They know when to turn back and live to climb again, and while they may not always be perfect, the!ir mistakes are those of competent climbers, not thrill seekers with a checkbook.
So I would suggest this is NOT an Everest book, as it does not chronicle circumstances that lead to the deaths of those who should not be there, were maimed, and died there. Even more distasteful are those books that state as fact brutal criticisms that are not always true, are cruel, and often are the memories of malfunctioning oxygen deprived minds. Ed Webster and his fellow climbers do speak of each being responsible for their own well-being, however their actions on the mountain preclude any possibility of leaving someone to die.
Some of the most renowned Himalayan climbing legends from Sir Edmund Hillary, Reinhold Messner, David Breashears, Chris Bonington, and many others have endorsed this book. Ed Webster and his teammates are considered by these same men to have climbed in a manner that deserves a place with the greatest ascents of Mt. Everest starting with George Mallory a!nd Sandy Irvine.
This 12-year effort of Webster's to write Snow in the Kingdom has produced far more than a book about climbing. It is an autobiography, a biography of others who climbed, a history of Chomolungma, a cultural documentation of very special people, and also of the evils of others who sought to destroy architecture dating to the 13th and 14th Centuries. Mr. Webster experienced the burden and absurdities that are the Chinese who while destroying Tibet were liberating it for reasons no philosophy can explain.
He tells these stories with beautiful, painfully personal and honest prose. He brings us the majesty of the mountain with 150 pages of color photographs, and 282 in black and white. mtnimagery.com provides even more spectacular photographs. He also brings you the people he met, the old, the children, and the world they inhabit. With never before published images he will take you along with Mallory and Irvine, what they saw you will see. He will sh!ow you Chomolungma as Mallory saw it from the ground, and how the Space Shuttle viewed the mountain from space. I would imagine the only details that are missing would require a trip to Everest herself.
The Author has opened his heart to readers. He shares a story at the book's beginning that almost stopped his climbing before he ever accomplished what this book records. He shares a climb when the woman he loved fell, and the hours he held her until she died. If you don't feel tears, or emotion rising from your gut as you read of this tragedy, you may be missing some painful but worthwhile emotions. He continued to climb with her always in his thoughts, carrying a scarf or other tangible memory of her. I would imagine that when he faced overwhelming exhaustion where death is not only apparent it seems to be preferred by the hypoxic mind, she helped him get up and climb down.
It is easy to question or reject as reckless these people that go where no one has gone b!efore, who know that any number of nature's whims could strike him or her down. After all the reading I have done, and the correspondence I have been privileged to have, I have my own opinion.
These are the personalities that push to climb higher, dive deeper, fly faster or farther than those who have gone before them. That they gain satisfaction and take pride in what they have done is integral to the privilege they feel for having had the opportunity to try. The true climbers do not always measure their success by whether they made the summit or turned around 300 feet from the top, to continue to live, endanger no one else, and to try again.
The book is a remarkable achievement from its construction to the wisdom it contains. I would hope it becomes reading for all those who consider the challenge and will reflect on whether or not they belong there, whether wives, husbands and children should be left for months while they pursue a climb.
It is a book I !can recommend without any qualification, a reading experience that will educate and enlighten all who read it, be they amongst those who decide to climb, or for those of us who stay closer to sea-level
Magnificent!
Rating:
Summary: Easily the Best
Review: After plodding through dozens of climbing books, half of them unreadable, this book was a great joy. Not only is it a beautiful volume, with voluminous footnotes and a painstaking attention to detail, but I also believe that Webster is an extraordinarily adept writer. I spent the better portion of two evenings reading "Snow in the Kingdom," and wanted to read it over again once I was finished. There is something uniquely magical about Webster's photographs, his philosophy, and his optimistic nature. The chapters dealing with the climb up the Kangshung face of Everest brought to attention the almost mystical nature of the high altitude experience, sans oxygen. It is easy to believe that after a while, utterly dwarfed by creation and crippled by thin air, man begins to feel a sense of cosmic meaning and purpose on a mountain. In many ways, all of the men on the 1988 Everest Kangshung climb were winning the race against time, drudgery, and (dare I say it) mortality. Perhaps a step into the void is the only way, in this short life, any of us can feel as though victory, however briefly, is at hand. Yes, Webster paid a terrible price in his venture on the ice walls of Everest. This book, however, should be redemption enough for that suffering. It is one of the very best of its kind.
Rating:
Summary: What is it like being there?
Review: As a non-climber, I've often wondered, "What does it feel like to be on Everest?" Many climber/authors seem to approach the question primarily by describing their emotions, not their senses. The result is often an unsatisfying allegorical sense of Everyman's struggle against the forces of nature. But I wanted to know what it felt like in terms of what your senses are feeding you. What do you see? What do you hear? What does it look like when you pause for breath and look around? What does the top look like, not just as you peer off to Tibet, but what is the ground like under your feet? Does it feel as if you're going to fall off the top? And what's it like to come back down? I think Ed Webster's book, Snow in the Kingdom, answers these questions better than anything else I've read. And the pictures complement the text wonderfully. I couldn't put it down. Read it in one sitting, and my cozy easy chair and favorite briar have never been as appreciated. Though at one point I could have persuaded myself that my toes were feeling a little chill. Thanks for the trip, Ed.
Rating:
Summary: PUSHING YOUR SELF
Review: Great Book! I do not write reviews because they are generally over rated! I do not promote anyone one but knowing how hard true climbing is and the ART of climbing this book is great for all. I recommend people who doubt themselves look at what Ed did from loosing someone to concuring his own fears. Worth the read! I understand some of this, as I have concured many of my own fears while serving in the Navy.
Rating:
Summary: PUSHING YOUR SELF
Review: Great Book! I do not write reviews because they are generally over rated! I do not promote anyone one but knowing how hard true climbing is and the ART of climbing this book is great for all. I recommend people who doubt themselves look at what Ed did from loosing someone to concuring his own fears. Worth the read! I understand some of this, as I have concured many of my own fears while serving in the Navy.
Rating:
Summary: Don't even THINK about missing this book!
Review: Here's the perfect weekend: a great book, a great subject and the company of great men and women...
Put this on your short list of essential adventure classics: fine writing, wonderful photography (and more of than you'd ever thought possible on a climb of this sort), profound emotion and the ultimate challenge...
I loved this book!
Thank God he survived to tell the tale...
Rating: 
Summary: Slow but powerful
Review: I read this one right after reading "into thin air". Ed Webster is not a true, talented story teller. Still the book takes you into the magical places of the earth nepal and tibet. Overall a good book to read if you can stand webster's insincere, unconvincing motivation: his guilt about his girlfriends death.
Rating:
Summary: the most handsomely crafted Everest Book ever produced
Review: Oh no, not another Everest book! you're thinking, right? But as one of the last in the recent glut of Everest memoirs (written by and about survivors/clients whom would have remained anonymous except for their friends/guides who died in 1996) Snow in the Kingdom may well be the magnum opus of all Everest books. Herein, you'll find no clients being towed by their guides, no tourist routes, no bottled oxygen, no climber traffic jams, and no Sherpas hauling the author's gear. This book is about the ultimate climb: the hardest route up the highest mountain. Finally, the author and his partners completed the climb for love rather than money. In Snow in the Kingdom, Ed Webster is a photographer above all else. Like others before him (Lito Tejada-Flores, James Balog, Galen Rowell) Ed knew that publishing his photo-intensive book with a conventional publisher would not allow him to obtain either the clarity or quantity that he needed to properly tell his story So Ed spent a decade rounding up the money, hired the best editors/designers/scanners that money could buy in Colorado (subsequently going into debt), and laboriously began self publishing his own book. We should be thankful that he's been down the road of self publishing before, because this is no amateur's tome. The end result: 150 pages of color photos in five separate signatures! Not counting 582 pages of text¾and even then you can't turn the book more than four pages without being arrested by a new black and white photo! All printed sharply on a 70-pound stock that does the photographer's work justice. If this isn't enough, the author has obtained unpublished photographs of Noel Odell's from Mallory's Everest expeditions, along with a host of pictures taken by other well-known Everest climbers and photographers. If you were to buy such a beautifully laid-out book like this from a conventional photo-book publisher, say Abrams or Chronicle, you'd pay twice as much and get half the text (eg, Bradford Washburn's elegant Mount McKinley opus). Because Snow in the Kingdom is not just breath-taking photographs of culture and history and real climbing. You will, and I would like to emphasize will, buy this book because Ed Webster gives us his heart and soul on a platter. His is a deeply personal story about loss. The loss of Lauren Husted, a woman he once loved, who died with her head in his lap after their climbing accident in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Loss of his fingers and toes to Everest. And loss of his ability to climb--a talent that sustained Ed Webster for nearly thirty years. Or to put it in one of his fondest quotes (by Elizabeth Knowlton): "To those men who are born for mountains, the struggle can never end, until their lives end¾to them it holds the very quintessence of living¾the fiery core, after the lesser parts have burned away." This is also a story about climbing the Kangshung Face of Mount Everest in 1989. The route is menaced by hanging glacier avalanches and technical climbing difficulties (famed alpinists Alex Lowe and David Breashears returned to the Kangshung several years later and found that they could not drag up their wealthy client, who later became famous in Into Thin Air for being dragged up the tourist route) and remains the territory of only world-class alpinists. On the way, the reader is given both an in-depth tour to Ed's emotions and the climbing history of Everest, including two of Ed's earlier attempts on the mountain. Through text and pictures, you meet many of the personalities of Everest and luminaries of climbing: Reinhold Messner, Sir John Hunt, Jim Bridwell, Audrey Saukeld, Peter Athens, rock star Billy Squier (one of Ed's clients), Sir Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Roger Marshall, Tenzing Norgay (and his son), Jay Smith, Sir Edmond Hillary, Fritz Wiessner; and Ed's Kangshung teammates: Paul Teare, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables. Of course, by the end, we learn the specific price for the 1989 Kangshung Face Team's boldness. Ed escorts his partners, more dead than alive, back down the face. No one is really unscathed, but Ed in particular will never be the same again. I'm not going to spill the denouement here, so the best I can do is encourage you to read the book and find out for yourself what happens, in the most handsomely crafted Everest book ever produced.
Rating:
Summary: the most handsomely crafted Everest Book ever produced
Review: Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. The writing is precise and perfect, the photography stunning beyond belief, and the quality of the book is excellent. To not read this book would be like missing out on some important part of life.
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