Volume 56, Number 11 · July 2, 2009
Getting High on the Himalayas
By Al Alvarez
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, with maps and peak sketches by Dee Molenaar
Yale University Press, 579 pp., $39.95
Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver's authoritative history of Himalayan mountaineering, Fallen Giants, starts right at the beginning, 45 million years ago, with the collision of tectonic plates that threw up what the authors call 'the greatest geophysical feature of the earth.' The Andes are the longest of the planet's mountain chains, but the Himalaya and its adjacent ranges, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, are far higher. They contain all fourteen of the world's peaks over eight thousand meters, or 26,247 feet; their northern rampart averages 19,685 feet—some five thousand feet higher than the Andes—and they are still growing: 'To this day India plows into Tibet at the breakneck speed of five centimeters a year and lifts the Himalaya by as much as a centimeter.'
Review, 4250 words
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