A Mes Montagnes, by Walter Bonatti. Translated into French from Italian by F. Germain, Collection Sempervivum No. 38. Paris: B. Arthaud, 1962. 291 pages, 41 illustrations, 5 maps and sketches.

This superb mountaineering chronicle has more hair-raising accounts in its pages than any book of its kind this reader has seen. It is definitely not recommended to anyone suffering from high blood pressure. Any young man determined on a mountaineering career should read it carefully to realize where his enthusiasm may lead him and also to consider if he has what it takes. Walter Bonatti, whose short visit to our Club in 1961 many of us remember with pleasure, was born in Bergamo near Milan and served his mountain apprenticeship in the Grigna, the Dolomites and the Val d’Aosta. He has been a guide at Courmayeur since 1957. His book is a protest against a mechanized world. Bonatti says he feels “like a boy who longs to admit to his friends, occupied with their mechanical and scientific toys, that he still wants to run barefoot and turn somersaults in a field.” He is most convincing in this, even if at times one feels one can hardly bear to think of yet another bivouac on an exposed ridge in a snowstorm.

It is hard to single out any one of the chapters of this book for special comment: they are all so exciting. The writer takes us up the north faces of the Grandes Jorasses, Badile and others in the Bregaglia, and the Lavaredos in the Dolomites, the latter in winter. In his home district of Mont Blanc he has explored all the major routes, some of them alone, and bivouacked on most of them. He has travelled widely: with the successful Italian expeditions to K2 and Gasherbrum IV and also in the Peruvian Andes and the practically virgin territory of the mountains and glaciers of Patagonia. In spite of his almost superhuman feats, his descriptions are often humorous and always intensely human; he loves every aspect of his mountains from the sublime to the ridiculous, and he is violently opposed to such "fancy” aids to climbing as expanding pitons. The story closes with the tragic account of the storm on the Frêney Pillar on Mont Blanc, where four of Bonatti’s friends and companions in 1961 lost their lives. This is definitely a worth while and absorbing book by a very real personality.

Ursula Corning