The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation

•The exploits of mountaineering’s most colorful band of adventurers

The Boys of Everest by Clint Willis tells the gripping story of “Bonington’s Boys,” a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest’s first ascent. It is a story of tremendous courage, astonishing achievement, and heartbreaking loss. Chris Bonington’s inner circle included a dozen of mountaineering’s most legendary figures—Don Whillans, John Harlin, Dougal Haston, Doug Scott, Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker, and others—who together gave birth to a new brand of climbing. They took increasingly challenging risks on now-legendary expeditions to the world’s most fearsome peaks—and they paid an enormous price. Most of them died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: was it worth it?

“Willis's classy style turns reportage into literature . . . Bonington's Boys come across as raw, anguished souls . . . As Willis describes in his artful prose, their suffering is not just a means to an end (the summit), it is an end.” –The New York Times

“A gripping adventure saga . . .”–Publishers Weekly

“A death-haunted saga of the scalers of heaven . . .” –Kirkus Reviews

“Mr. Willis tells a story that is gripping and poignant and even appalling . . .” –The Wall Street Journal

© 2017 Mountaineers Books (Ebook): 9781680510881

Release date

Ebook: 15 March 2017