Book Details
336
September 21, 2015
Width: 6 in
Height: 9 in
Epic at every level – literary, historical and ruggedly spiritual – this chronicle of a remote mountain culture tucked away in Eastern Europe’s Julian Alps portrays ascent as both personal quest and national salvation. Welcome to Slovenia and its extraordinary alpinists, and to a thin, mysterious tome known as Pot, or The Path. In the 1970s, when climbers from an impoverished Cold War backwater, using homemade clothing and gear (wooden pitons!), barged into the arena of 8000-metre peaks, no one could explain them. Here at last is their story.
Alpine Warriors is an important book, possibly one of mountain literature’s greatest works, not only for its tale but also for the intelligence, agility and poetry that Bernadette McDonald brings to its telling. Weaving together generations of legendary climbers, she guides us into a land better known for its gypsies and castles through an ever-changing backdrop of violence (from the Second World War and post-war massacres to genocide in Bosnia).
Muscular and tautly drawn, the page-turning adventures in Alpine Warriors connect in the simple mysticism of Pot, a declaration of love for the mountains. Though its 31-year-old author, Nejc Zaplotnik, died in the Himalayas in 1983, his book within McDonald’s book became the bridge between his nation’s survival and its mountain soul.
A cross between the movie Chariots of Fire, Carlos Castaneda’s desert shaman in The Teachings of Don Juan, and certain rare histories written with a novelist’s palette such as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Alpine Warriors takes mountain literature – and mountain culture – to new heights.—Jeff Long, author of The Wall
To be sure, modern mountaineering is a British, and also a Central European, invention. Finally, after the Polish, Slovenian climbers took traditional alpinism one step further.—Reinhold Messner, alpinist, author of My Life at the Limit
A fascinating account of the extraordinary achievements of the alpinists from this tiny Slovenian nation which has spawned some of the most talented, colourful, controversial and innovative mountaineers of modern climbing history. Once started, I couldn’t put the book down till it was finished.—Sir Chris Bonington, alpinist, author of I Chose to Climb