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Showing posts with the label mountaineering

AudioBook Review: Into the Silence, by Wade Davis

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  Title: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest Author:  Wade Davis, read by Enn Reitel Publication Info: Random House Audio, 2011, 29 hours. Original hardback, Knopf Canada, 2011, 672 pages. Source: Library (Overdrive) Publisher's Blurb: If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the gun

Non-fiction Review: The Winter Army

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Title: The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America's Elite Alpine Warriors Author: Maurie Isserman. Narrated by Brian Troxell Publication Info: Audible Audio, 2019. Hardcover 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages Source: Library digital resoures   Publisher's Blurb/Goodreads: The epic story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, whose elite soldiers broke the last line of German defenses in Italy’s mountains in 1945, spearheading the Allied advance to the Alps and final victory. At the start of World War II, the US Army had two cavalry divisions—and no mountain troops. The German Wehrmacht, in contrast, had many well-trained and battle-hardened mountain divisions, some of whom by 1943 blocked the Allied advance in the Italian campaign. Starting from scratch, the US Army developed a unique military fighting force, the 10th Mountain Division, drawn from the ranks of civilian skiers, mountaineers, and others with outdoor ex