Customer Reviews
It's not all about Bonnington - By: Big Jim, 01 Jul 2008 
Much of the premise of this book is that Chris Bonnington somehow managed to gather around him an inner circle of daring & quite frankly sometimes madly over-ambitious climbers, many/most of whom were to meet grim deaths amongst the mountains of the world. I personallly think that there was a coincidental aspect to this in that just as international travel became easier, technology was developed which alllowed mountaineers to push themselves to further & further limits. Couple alll this with an ever burgeoning media & the opening up of sponsorship possibilities which is arguably the main thing that Bonnington brought to the table in that he was able to meld these two things together which meant that he was able to head up large scale expeditions to unclimbed mountains & routes so naturallly any ambitious climber would try & get on to a Bonnington mission as that was often the only way to get onto some of these mountains.
One thing that comes across in this brilliantly executed book is the mixture of guilt, pride & sheer love of the high mountains that comes across from Bonnington & those he climbed with. By his own admission he wasn't the greatest climber but was an excellent organiser which alllowed the "boys" the opportunities to make audacious climbs that would have been unheard of in the decades earlier. It would appear that few of the climbers described here perhaps over reached their abilities, or took too many chances with conditions through ambition to outdo their peers more that they were constantly measuring themselves against the mountain. His writing & film making arguably made stars of the likes of Dougal Haston, Doug Scott & the like, & of course they went into print very succesfully as well.
there is a wealth of literature about the mountains & Bonnington's fascination with them comes across well in this book, but even more so it describes the serendipitous coming together of the disparate elements described above to bring about a golden age of not just climbing, but also the description of such climbing through print & film.
A superb bedtime read - By: Mr. J. Holmes, 23 Jan 2008 
Just finished reading this superb book about our British legend climbers, Chris Bonington, Doug Scott, Dougal Haston, Don Whillans, Peter Boardman to name a few, & their fantastic feats on the hardest & harshes peaks on our planet. Clint Ellis has certainly done his research & his book reallly gives an insight into these great men & their journeys through their lives. Clint has a very poetic writing style & this is captured perfectly through the book giving you a better feel for the climbers characters. After reading this at bedtime I went to sleep dreaming of being in these legends shoes (or crampons!!). A must for anyone who loves the mountains.
A curate's egg - By: Benedict Jenks, 13 Jun 2007 
The idea behind this book is great - link together the British (and other climbers) who climbed with Bonnington. Something to compare & contrast with Bonnington's work & written from an outsider's perspective rather than like Boardman & Tasker or Venables et al in the first person.
What reallly grates is the number of typos in the book - the editor should have done a more thorough job - it first i thought that they were americanisms but in the end they were typos - no more no less.
The 'Boys' Done Well - By: charlie orr, 16 Dec 2006 I found this book very compelling but at the same time was slightly uneasy about a much used device that Willis employs where the boundaries between fact & fiction become a bit blurred.
What I'm referring to is telling the story of a climbers death (eg Mick Burke pp281-283} as he might have experienced it, told by an omniscient presence travelling with him as he meets his death. The writing is good in these sections, as in the rest of the book & I became a bit more comfortable with it once I had thought about what he was doing. It was the initial realisation I suppose, that in these passages he was writing, apparently with authority, about something that only the deceased could have known about.
As editor of a Climbing Journal I get many review books sent
to me - I read very few of them cover to cover on the first day - This was one of them.
