Great books. A must for mountaineers
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Just a great group of Mountaineering books, original adventure, pain and suffering, emotion and humour. What more could you want. Right up there with White Spinder as a benchmark for other books.
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Armchair mountaineering Grade V
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The four books aren't just interesting because of their subject matter. Its the quality of the writing, personal insights and revelations made all the more poignant by the fact that both of the guys died together. I recommend the Boardman Tasker Omnibus without reservation. An inspiration.
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Even good for non-climbers...
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I read this book after beginning it in a climbing friend's house and not being able to put it down. As a non-climber, I wanted to know "why"! And I still don't know, but I don't think they knew either. But it is a fascinating read, especially when you can read both accounts of the same mountain (e.g. Changabang). Tasker's accounts tend to be much more straight accounts (especially in his earlier books), while Boardman's have more analysis (and also more technical description) but both styles are easy to read and manage to paint a picture of what they're doing to someone like me, with absolutely no knowledge of the sport at all. And having read them, I now have a huge amount of respect for the guys (and girls) who go off to try to do these things.
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Classic Mountaineering
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Both Joe Tasker & Peter Boardman are excellent writers. By combining their works into one book, especially the accounts of when they climbed together something special occurs. The reader obtains a rare insight into the inner workings of ordinary human beings attempting extrordinary feats. This is a very honest account of climbing, it contains the disagreements, as well as the similarities that kept them together whilst engaged in alpine ascents that stretched the limits of mountaineering, whilst being done on a shoe string budget.
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Fascinating
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A full four books to plough through, but well worth the effort. Boardman and Tasker, for me, hold more fascination even than Mallory and Irvine, and you get a very full picture of both of them by seeing them both through their own eyes and through the eyes of the other. Both intelligent, honest, articulate, humorous and aware of their own weaknesses (and strengths), they really come alive in the text. My favourite passages were the two accounts of the ground-breaking Changabang expedition - their first expedition together - where they get to know each other. Boardman was the "superstar", having climbed Everest's South-West Face the previous year, but he clealry felt like a bit of an impostor, and had greater admiration for Tasker's earthier, less well-known but more radical achievements. A constant subtext for the reader is the knowledge that they died together on Everest's North-East Ridge in 1982 - perhaps by finally pushing themselves beyond the limit. It is far from clear that they knew their limits, and there is an almost tragic element to Tasker's description of the second failed attempt to climb K2, in 1980. He drove himself to exhaustion, was lucky to escape alive, but came out of the experience more convinced than ever that he needed to climb. It almost seems inevitable that, with Boardman to spur him on, he would eventually bite off more than he could chew.
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