K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain. Jim Curran. The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1995. 271 pages. Black-and-white photographs, 16 in color, seven maps and topographical drawings. $24.95.

Many are the books about individual expeditions to K2, the world’s second highest summit. In recent years that number has proliferated in proportion to the reputation for ferociousness the mountain has earned. But there has hitherto been no book that tells K2’s full story and that includes between its covers the sum of the ordeals and sacrifices endured by the people of many beliefs, languages, races and nationalities who have been attracted to K2 as by a magnet. Jim Curran’s compact, informative and well-rounded account fills the gap.

In writing what clearly started out as a history, Curran, whether deliberately or not, has achieved three objectives of value to the reader: First, he makes available an almost encyclopedical and well-organized mass of history. Second, his text introduces a powerful cautionary element badly needed for future visitors to the mountain, and which contains valuable objective lessons. And third, he supplies a great deal of statistical data not previously available in any one volume.

Curran is well-equipped for his task. He has climbed on K2, albeit not to the top. He is the author of K2: Triumph and Tragedy, the intricate story of the multiple catastrophes of 1986. He has the qualifications of a good writer and he is also an excellent photographer. Equally significant, he is the veteran of much expeditionary climbing and his personal experiences have long since taught him what the game is all about. Whenever possible he interviews eye witnesses to important events, and where this is not possible he refers to the most truthful and accurate written records he can find.

As writer and chronicler, Curran’s real strength lies in his ability to analyze complicated and unusually tangled events, to unravel the strands and to describe situations in straightforward terms that can be understood by everyone. As might be expected, Curran’s story commences with the discovery of K2 by Lieutenant Montgomerie in 1856 and continues to the present (1995). Curran overlooks no expedition, however little known or unsuccessful. This attention to detail continues right up to the book’s end, when the proliferation of incidents begins to overwhelm the lofty bastions of K2 and tests even Curran’s almost unlimited resources. But somehow he manages to keep the growing standing-room-only situation well under control.

As stated earlier, this book is more than a mere chronology of half-forgotten facts bundled together, so to speak, under a single roof. There is almost no end to poignant moments with their hard decisions, acts of chivalry and iron courage. Curran pulls no punches when he underscores what K2 has exacted from its visitors: the desperate efforts of the Houston expedition to challenge the impossible and rescue Art Gilkey; A1 Rouse’s sacrifice of his own life in order to keep his companions alive; and other, almost equally dramatic scenes. The reader cannot help but emerge from the text with sentiments of awe and humility.

And such feelings are precisely those needed for anyone who may ever try to reach K2’s summit. Sooner or later, no matter how skillful the climber may be, a narrow escape might well be called for. Any feeling of hubris, Curran intimates, will inevitably compound the risks of catastrophe, for more than any other mountain, K2 is a killer, even by its least dangerous route.

Take a look for a moment at the appendices where all the skeletons are buried. They tell us that since 1939, when a world-class but misguided mountaineer thought he could safely lead a kindly, myopic and thoroughly incompetent companion to the top, 113 people have trod the summit — but there have been 37 deaths. Thus for every two persons to succeed a third has died. You think that’s a shocker? Read on! Dig down a bit more into the archives and you discover that virtually all those who have stepped onto K2 since World War II have been world class mountaineers with awesome climbing records. K2 is no picnic, nor is world-class status of much significance as one passes the 27,000-foot level on K2, for here even the best of us are testing the outer limits of human physiology. Here a dulling of the mind takes over, which can prove fatal in delicate places. Again and again, Curran insists that the moment of triumph is also that of peril: above a certain altitude no one can survive for long. So if you reach the top, turn around immediately, whatever the temptations to linger on the summit. And then go down, down, down as fast and as long as conditions permit.

Will the climbers of tomorrow who read this book heed Curran’s warnings? If the answer is “yes,” Curran will have rendered the climbing community a valuable public service. It seems more likely, however, that some of us will perpetuate our own follies and at the crucial moment throw caution to the winds in an effort to get to the top. Indeed, were he younger, this reviewer would perhaps succumb himself to the enticements and enchantments of possible victory. Temptation for mountaineers, as with all men, is hard to overcome.

Inevitably any book that packs between its covers more than a century of human activity and hundreds of players will contain errors. This reviewer has already drawn the author’s attention to some of these. One concerns an incident on Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, which the author might have studied more carefully in order to get his facts straight. More serious is the implication that the 1939 (also the 1938) American expedition travelled by rail from Rawalpindi to Srinagar in Kashmir. The rail service did not exist, and both Jack Durrance’s and George Sheldon’s diaries state clearly that the party went by motor, and that the experience was a bit dicey. This reviewer, who has a bias about the 1939 expedition, would also have appreciated more discussion about the philosophical attitudes toward mountaineering that separated Wiessner from Durrance — the former the innovative amateur, the latter the professional guide. But in general the errors and omissions are few and trivial.

This reviewer knows it is not easy to write about K2 any more than it is to climb it. Almost all the events that have taken place on its flanks have been difficult to describe, let alone analyze. As Curran knows there are residual mysteries that neither he nor anyone else will ever resolve — this starting back in the days of Aleister Crowley. Curran, however, has succeeded in bringing the mountain, its tragedies, and its somewhat fewer triumphs into the reader’s living room — a more comfortable locale than a bivouac tent above K2’s shoulder. So buy this book and read it, preferably in warm surroundings. You will not be disappointed.

Andrew John Kaufman