Davis’s thorough research gives him an almost omniscient eye. In Into the Silence, he brings his talents as an ethnographer to bear in portraying the mostly British teams that led the expeditions (a Canadian and an Australian figured prominently as well). “The book is not the only one on the subject, but it is the only one most of us will ever need. “Powerful and profound, a moving, epic masterpiece of literature, history and hope.” -The Times“Davis has produced a magnificent, rigorously researched account of the expeditions that set out to regain glory for an empire in decline but, instead, created some of the most enduring legends of the 20th century.” -Financial Times At once a group biography of remarkable characters snatched from oblivion, an instant classic of mountaineering literature, a study in imperial decline and an epic of exploration.” -The Guardian“Magnificent.

a magnificent, audacious venture.” -The Sunday Times At its heart, Into the Silence is an elegy for a lost generation.

It not only spins a gripping Boy’s Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redemption at the top of the world. “Into the Silence is quite unlike any other mountaineering book. Featured in the Quill & Quire Fall Preview.Sunday Times best history books of 2011.Financial Times best travel books of 2011.An Editors’ Pick A Daily Beast Must-Read Book.Rave reviews for Into the Silence by Wade Davis In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.īeautifully written and rich with detail, Into the Silence is a classic account of exploration and endurance, and a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers, soldiers, and mountaineers the likes of which we will never see again. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context: Davis shows how the exploration originated in nineteenth-century imperial ambitions, and he takes us far beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered.

With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s.