The Everest Boys: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of a Generation of Mountaineers

Your limbs ache, your toes freeze, you feel the icy wind burning. A great story.' Esquire
'As excellent as it is exciting, Willis places himself in the category of Peter Matthiessen, Heinrich Harrar and Jon Krakauer.' The Boston Phoenix
The Everest Boys tells the harrowing story of the Bonington Boys: a motley crew of young men who reinvented mountaineering three decades after the first Everest ascent. It is a story of boundless courage, astonishing achievement and heartbreaking loss. Chris Bonington’s inner circle included a dozen free-spirited individuals who, with sometimes shockingly little equipment, took increasingly greater risks on notorious expeditions to the most dangerous peaks. They paid a high price for this: many of them died in the mountains over the years.
In retrospect, was it worth the price? The Everest Boys attempts to answer this inexorable question. The book is based on interviews with the climbers who survived and many others involved, and on revealing expedition reports, diaries, letters and memoirs.