Clint Willis - The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbings Greatest Generation

The Boys of Everest celebrates that crazy bunch they called Boningtons Boys and tells their story in compelling detail.

Scottish Sunday Mail

The Boys of Everest is as exquisite as it is exciting. It belongs on that rarified shelf where only the most accomplished and ambitious writers work can survive. Clint Willis will rank with the likes of Peter Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard), Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet) and Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air).

Peter Kadzis, Editor, The Boston Phoenix

The book is genuinely exciting as Mr Willis dramatically recounts the competition of egos and the close calls on treacherous Himalayan peaks, and grows increasingly sombre as the toll grows. The story of the band of climbers known as Boningtons Boys is a good and worthy one. Mr Willis tells a story that is gripping and poignant and even appalling. Just like the mountains themselves.

The Wall Street Journal

Clint Willis lively writing and his reporting lan lend The Boys of Everest a gripping, you-are-there quality. Your limbs ache, your toes freeze, you feel the burn of the icy wind. A wonderful read.

Mike Sager, Contributing Editor, US Esquire

This book, with its vivid evocation of high-altitude derring-do, is so breathtaking you may need to read it with supplemental oxygen.

Michael Finkel, author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa

Fascinating. Willis meticulous, pitch-by-pitch accounts of climbs on the savage Eiger, the killer Annapurna, the intensely difficult Northeast Ridge of Everest and other major routes will make gripping readingthe detailed narrative brings out the strength and courage of men pushed to their limits. Its enough to make non-climbers ask again the age-old question: why do men climb mountains?

The Washington Post

What could arguably have proven the most contentious parts of the book have, in my opinion, proven to be its greatest strength, that of moving into the realms of story. I would hesitate to call this fiction because, although fulfilling all the requirements of that genre, the passages I refer to go further than that description alone would suggest. The passages concerned are narrated by an omniscient presence travelling with some of these climbers shortly before their deaths and deal with emotions and feelings that only the climber himself could have known about. So yes, in one sense they are fictions but I would argue that it is in these passages that Willis sets himself apart from other more prosaic authors and thus ensures both a wide readership and a lasting place in the literature of climbing. I receive many review books. Rarely do I read them cover-to-cover the day I receive them. This is one such book.

Charlie Orr, Editor, The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal

I think the great accomplishment of Willis book is that he manages to write about the interiority of the climbers feelings and fears without collapsing into trite platitudes. There is something about Willis narrative as he traces the arc of the climbers lives that makes their continual return to the mountains fascinating and the loss of many of their lives truly tragic.

Chris Mitchell, Editor, spikemagazine.com

A gripping adventure sagaof life spent teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Publishers Weekly

What is an American editor of ripping-yarn anthologies doing retelling the heroic story of our boys as a tragedy revolving around Bonington? Actually, Clint Willis has done surprisingly well, partly because he has a perceptive sense of character and partly because he has listened carefully to the survivors. Willis is a gripping story-teller. All of his writing skills are brought to bear on the evidence he has sifted, which he treats with respect and sincerity, and the result is a highly readable imaginative exploration of events. Read the three-decade rollercoaster ride of this bold, gripping and thought-provoking book.

Terry Gifford, author and climber

The Boys of Everest takes us deep inside the hearts and minds of men at once quixotic and genuinely noble. Willis has an extraordinary gift for conveying states of mind in extremis, particularly those moments for a climber when all the comfortable assumptions about himself fall away. The reader feels a powerful shock of recognition, whether or not he or she has ever been anywhere near a mountain.

John Manderino, author of Reasons for Leaving and The Man Who Once Played Catch with Nellie Fox

The Boys of Everest is a captivating story and read. Its very, very good.

Ed Webster, author of Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest

For Jennifer and Harper and Abner

Chris Bonington and the
Tragedy of Climbings
Greatest Generation

CLINT WILLIS

Chris Bonington

Hamish MacInnes

Don Whillans

Ian Clough

John Harlin

Dougal Haston

Mick Burke

Nick Estcourt

Martin Boysen

Doug Scott

Peter Boardman

Joe Tasker

Dick Renshaw

Al Rouse

Petit Dru, Bonatti Pillar (French Alps)