What the books are about

HIMALAYAN NEWS SERVICE

This gripping and triumphant memoir follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000 metre summit at a time. For 18 years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail — to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000 metre peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts To The Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink

from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached

its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto. Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory. It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few

of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal

and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts To The Top is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers.

Happiness

Although we are materially better off than ever before, surveys show that we are depressed and listless. In his revolutionary book, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, shows that happiness is not just an emotion, but a skill that can be developed. Free of mumbo jumbo, Happiness contains 20-minute exercises to train the mind to recognise and pursue happiness by concentrating on life’s fundamentals.

Guests Of The Ayatollah

When in 1979 the American Embassy in Teheran was overrun by Islamic students and the diplomats made hostage no one could have imagined that 14 months later they would still be there. This ran contrary to

every notion of civilised co-existence that westerners had. The nearest

thing would be the tentative seizure of diplomatic enclave in Peking at the turn of the 19th century, but then it was defeated. Mark Bowden brings superbly alive the event, explains it and gives the point of view of the hostage,

the hostage takers, President Carter fighting with increasing difficulty for his re-election and let us guess — the only thing possible — the state of mind of the men in power behind the scene in Teheran.

The Emperor Of All Maladies

A magnificent, beautifully written biography of cancer — from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles to cure, control and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence. In The Emperor Of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with — and perished from — for more than 5,000 years.

Born Free

Fifty years ago Joy Adamson first introduced to the world the story of her life alongside Elsa the lioness, whom she had rescued as an orphaned cub, and raised at her home in Kenya. But as Elsa had been born free, Adamson made the heartbreaking decision that she must be returned to the wild when she was old enough to fend for herself. Since the first publication of Born Free and its sequels Living Free and Forever Free, generations of readers have been enchanted, inspired and moved by these books’ uplifting charm and the

remarkable interaction between Joy and Elsa. But here is the chance to rediscover the original story in this 50th anniversary edition, in the words of the woman who reared Elsa and walked with the lions.