The Boys of Everest

•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