Everest 1953

Year: 2013 Pages: 334 While Great Britain celebrates the coronation of Elizabeth II, the media spread the first news about another epochal event: the conquest of Everest, the highest mountain on Earth. New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay are the first men to climb to the roof of the world, thanks to a perfectly successful expedition under the leadership of Colonel John Hunt. Sixty years after this extraordinary feat, Mick Conefrey reconstructs, through unpublished documents and first-hand interviews with the protagonists, the events that led to English success. And it reveals all the background, crises and controversies - both on the wall and at home - that no one has ever told: from the daring search for funding to the Sherpa rebellion, from adverse weather conditions to the hostility of the national press. And Conefrey puts in the right perspective, in addition to the great organizational skills combined with an accommodating character and a healthy patriotic spirit of Colonel Hunt, also the personalities who have remained more in the shadows in the official accounts, such as Eric Shipton, the enigmatic "Mr Everest" who was denied the leadership of the expedition, or Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, who had to give up a hundred meters from life. Thanks to his passionate research among the letters, diaries and memories of the protagonists of the time, Conefrey has written an intense and emotional book on one of the most epic pages of mountaineering of all time.