The Mountain World, 1958/59, edited for the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research by Othmar Gurtner and Marcel Kurz; English version by Malcolm Barnes, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1958, 208 pages text, 68 pages illustrations including double-spreads and foldouts. Price $6.00. A new volume of this title is published every other year, devoted to the world’s major mountaineering expeditions during recent months. The most notable articles are on the first ascents of three 8000-meter summits, Manaslu by Maki and Imanishi; Broad Peak by Diemberger; and Gasherbrum II by Moravec. Other articles on the Himalaya include Bara Shigri, by Delany; Machapuchare, by Noyce; and a geological treatise on the Everest region, by Müller. There are fine accounts of climbing in Peru in the reports on Huagaruncho, by Westmacott; on the Cordillera Blanca and Vilcanota, by Hauser; and on Nevado Jirishhanca and El Toro, by Klier. The last-named author gives a short and arresting vignette of the Quechua mountain Indians "a life beyond progress and atomic fear, but also beyond hope and confidence.… We would not be able to endure it for long.”

Gilbert Roberts has written concisely of the first ascent of the East Peak of Mount Logan and there are articles on Mont Blanc, Mount Rainier, Mexican volcanoes, and Mount Olympus of Greece. The photographs are splendid. One of them, the picture of Hermann Buhl’s tracks to the edge of the broken cornice on Chogolisa, is memorable and saddening. The views of Nevado Alpamayo, K2, and Jirishhanca are outstanding.

The chapter on "The Eiger Myth,” although superbly illustrated, strikes a discordant note. The author has revived the old unfair accusation that the climbers who made the first ascent of the North Wall, "fellows with their sharply chiselled features.… whose skin was at stake,” did so in response to "what a nihilistic-revolutionary regime expected of them.” The two Austrians, at least, Kasparek and Harrer, were not Nazis and certainly were not climbing in response to any political regime. They were young fellows climbing because they loved to climb. Kasparek, who was killed a few years ago while climbing in the Andes, has left an autobiography in which he describes a life of devotion to climbing. (Vom Peilstein zur Eiger-Nord wand, Salzburg, 1951.) Harrer, famous for his "Seven Years in Tibet,” has continued to climb great and difficult mountains; in Alaska, for instance, Mount Deborah and Mount Hunter (A.A.J., 1955, 9:2, p. 39). And we doubt that the two Bavarians, either, were activated by any motives other than those appropriate to competent courageous climbers. Vörg appears as the one who sustained the spirits of the others during their hours of struggle; while Heckmair has obviously been preoccupied with climbing to the exclusion of any active form of politics. Guido Tonella has said, in his preface to Anderl Heckmair’s Les Trois Derniers Problèmes des Alpes (1949), "We know that the pitons placed by Heckmair and Cassin, by Frendo and Lachenal, by Terray and Rébuffat, on the overhangs of the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses have become the firmest anchors of the European Rope, which is the ideal of all of us.” And perhaps this is a good sentence with which to close a review of The Mountain World, a book that is recommended to everyone who loves mountains.

Thomas H. Jukes

Editor’s note:—A book of such importance, replete with accounts of great mountaineering, rich in content, offers many aspects for the reviewers’ comment. Two reviews are, therefore, presented in order to give fuller coverage. While both accord high praise to the book as a whole, each has its point of dissent. It is regrettable that it is necessary to take issue with such a great editor as the late Othmar Gurtner, but those who knew him would, I am sure, agree that he would not have regarded it as unfriendly.—F.P.F.