Mountaineering Holiday, by Frank Smythe. 8 vo.; 229 pages, with 24 illustrations and a map. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940. Price 12/6.

This book describes the Alpine vacation and guideless climbing of two experienced English mountaineers. The book is appealing both because it describes people and places familiar to the average alpine climber, and because it clearly pictures people and places we may now revisit only through books. Smythe and Gavin in the summer of 1939 did classic routes and easy climbs as well as hard ones; and like all climbers they had good and bad days. The discomforts of crowded huts and windy bivouacs were compensated by the Chamonix patisserie, successes on Mt. Blanc and Mt. Blanc de Courmayeur, and the good fellowship of other climbers on the way. As we read Smythe’s account of the guides and the huts, the guided and the guideless, we again see that real mountaineers of foreign countries are instinctive friends, people with a common bond that transcends petty nationalism. Let us hope that when this war is over, Germans and British, French and Italians and Americans will again mingle on summits in the Alps with the same friendliness and generosity as before.

No dull “guidebook type” ascents mar Mountaineering Holiday. The illustrations are good, and the style, if too leisurely, moves pleasantly along.

R. H. B.