Into the Silence

Summary

A history of the British expeditions to Mount Everest in the 1920s that reads them not as straightforward tales of adventure but as the response of a traumatised generation of soldiers and officers to the slaughter of the First World War. Davis spent twelve years in archives recovering the diaries, letters, and military records of the climbers, arguing that Everest became a site where men went to test whether they were still capable of feeling alive after the trenches. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, the book transformed understanding of why those expeditions happened and what the mountain meant to the people who attempted it.