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  • Into the Silence

  • By: Wade Davis
  • Narrated by: Enn Reitel
  • Length: 28 hrs and 53 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (303 ratings)
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Into the Silence cover art

Into the Silence

By: Wade Davis
Narrated by: Enn Reitel
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Summary

Winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize

A monumental work of history, biography and adventure – the First World War, Mallory and Mount Everest – ten years in the writing. 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 killed by disease at the Front; one hospitalized twice with shell shock; three army surgeons, who 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 guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: 'The price of life is death.' Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but 'a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day'. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive. For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

An Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, Wade Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Davis is the author of 15 books including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and The Wayfinders. His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series produced for the National Geographic Channel. In 2009 he received the Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for his contributions to anthropology and conservation, and he is the 2011 recipient of the Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers' Club, and the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration, the most prestigious prize for botanical exploration.

©2013 Wade Davis (P)2013 Audible Ltd
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

"I was captivated. Wade Davis has penned an exceptional book on an extraordinary generation. From the pathos of the trenches to the inevitable tragedies high on Everest this is a book deserving of awards." (Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void)
"Powerful and profound, a moving, epic masterpiece of literature, history, and hope." ( Sunday Times)
"Brilliantly engrossing...a superb book... At once a group biography of remarkable characters snatched from oblivion, an instant classic of mountaineering literature, a study in imperial decline, and an epic of exploration." (Nigel Jones, Guardian)

What listeners say about Into the Silence

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Epic prize winner

This book is quite unlike anything else that I have read. The main themes: the challenge of the mountain faced by the WW1 generation against the background of the Raj are all well described. Personally, I am not convinced that the awful experiences of the soldier involved has particular relevance to Everest but this book did win the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. The one section of this very long book that dragged for me was the first expedition. The climax is compelling and very moving.

The narrator has a great voice, even when he has a cold. But he mispronounces some names (Passion-Deli, by far the worst example) in a way that I found jarring, a small but surprising fault. I felt the whole performance could have been better produced.

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12 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Disappointly boring - just too much detail

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

No. I am so disappointed; I was really looking forward to this as a big fan of mountaineering books, however in the end despite trying very hard to persevere, I gave up listening in part three as I was just so bored. The book needed some brutal editing, the level of detail was simply interminable. The forensic account of seemingly every single hour of the 1921 Everest expedition eventually became too much for me and I had to switch off as I could no longer stay awake. I have say though that this is not a criticism of the narrator who actually did a very good job, especially considering the material he had to wade through.

What was most disappointing about Wade Davis’s story?

The level of detail. This book needed better editing to take out a significant amount of unnecessary and frankly boring information.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

The discussion relating to Mallory and Bullock missing the key to the mountain in 1921.

If this book were a film would you go see it?

No, not unless I knew that 95% of the book had been cut.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Haunting, beautiful and fascinating

You may have seen the grainy footage of Mallory and Irvine disappearing into the snowy vastness of Everest and the mystery of what happened to them afterwards has been enough to generate a whole series of investigations. But the genius of this book is the way it details how the whole climbing party got to that point from the Edwardian public school system via the carnage of the first world war. The war is presented as jaw droppingly awful and somehow Davis manages to find new ways to excite disgust and pity on a topic which has been written about endlessly. He goes on though to write touchingly about the aftermath of the war, the fallout for survivors and the bereaved and the place that mountain climbing played in the imagination of people who were left wholly changed by the experience of the first industrialised conflict. Once the action shifts to Everest there is plenty of interest to be found in the enormous isolation of the region and the overwhelming challenges faced by an expedition ludicrously under equipped by modern standards.

One passage that sums up the virtues of Davis as an author is the section dealing with those who wrote to the organisers of the first expedition asking to be included in the party. A lesser author might have had a bit of fun at the expense of the wide selection of totally unqualified volunteers who put themselves forward. Davis pays them the respect of telling a bit of their story to give the reader a sense of people who had really done something in the their lives and just wanted to experience adventure; like the guy who had been in action at the Front from the start of the war in 1914 right the way through to 1918 prior to staying on for a further year as the troops were demobilized. Davis takes the trouble to acknowledge that whatever his defficiencies as a mountaineer this is someone who was both incredibly brave and with much more than his fair share of luck.

It's hard to believe that there is a single interesting thing left to say about WW1 and Everest but this is an enormously rewarding listen.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Monumental.......

This is certainly one of the "best" audiobooks I have ever listened to. I put best in quotation marks as it is very hard to compare to say a crime thriller or pure history. I am not surprised that it took 10 years to write as the scope is vast - from the depths of the trenches of the first world war to the heights of Everest.
I finished listening and I know that I will have to listen again as there is so much detail and information provided on the war, climbing and religion that I have certainly failed to take in quite a lot of it.
I do know one thing though, Mallory and his ilk, although perhaps driven in a way I can't really understand, are men who deserve respect (in the proper old fashioned use of the word) and really did feel that if they died while trying to achieve something they believed in utterly, it wasn't a waste.

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Remarkable book

- Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to summit Mt. Everest, said “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Several quotes from this remarkable book, that I also loved, include the sad quote from a woman reflecting on the horror of the war in stating that “all the men I ever danced with are dead”.
- This is a remarkable masterpiece of writing about the theme that “the price of life is death” for all those who had lived through the first world war or the Great War. Wade Davis tells the story of the early exploration into Tibet by Francis Younghusband, which began the first conquest of Tibet by a European and during that duration of looking at the possibility of climbing Everest, accounts of the most horrific war run in the most idiotic way of the great war that many of these climbers survived, and of the first three attempts to conquer climb Mount Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924.
– The accounts of the First World War are remarkable, Davis has collected and researched diaries of those who climbed the mountain which include many of their accounts of war, which are truly horrific. The fact that the British generals refused to use steel helmet which would protect a man’s head much better than the cloth cap they used, refuse to use machine guns and choose rifles which shot at a much slower rate than the machine guns used by the enemy and in some of the attacks on the Germans, Allied soldiers were made to walk rather than run and rush the German trenches and were mowed down like cattle in seconds. The generals were truly incompetent but idealising british history. A couple of quotes amongst so many include the following:
- “Other witnesses remember Wakefield hesitating and then slowly beginning to sob as the flag drew back to reveal the names of those who had perished: caught on the barbed wire, drowned in mud, choked by the oily slime of gas, reduced to a spray of red mist, quartered limbs hanging from shattered branches of burnt trees, bodies swollen and blackened with flies, skulls gnawed by rats, corpses stuck in the sides of trenches that aged with each day into the colours of the dead.”
- “Vera Brittain, a nurse who had already lost her brother and her two best friends, and in time would lose Roland [her fiance] as well. “The dugouts have been nearly all blown in,” he wrote, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men … Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?”
– The book then focuses on the initial scouting group in 1921 with an attempt to climb Mount Everest, followed by two more in 1922 and 1924. This is real boys adventure stuff but it’s also a fascinating look into different cultures and landscapes. I think Wade Davis writes with remarkable pros and he is one of my favourite writers whom I could listen to him talk about anything.
– On a personal note I have travelled through Tibet, India and Nepal and it was interesting listening to the depictions of these countries and places that I have seen and visited, and hear as they were described at the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been to many places described, slept one night on Everest base camp (they have a Buddhist monastery there) in Tibet and visited many of these places described in the book. I’ve also drunk my fair share of Yak tea, cooked withYak dung - like watery tea strained through a smelly sock with the smell of petroleum. Tibet’s culture is truly remarkable and its people and beliefs are fascinating and well described. This is a book about death that can make you appreciate life. It could be travel reportage, boys' own adventure, a spiritual guide to different cultures and the very belief that ‘the price of life is death’ as so many of these men who tried to conquer the tallest mountain in the world had already lost so much.
– For such a long book I really didn’t want it to end, I loved every word of it – the spiritual, physical, the characters who attempted to climb the tallest mountain on the planet because “it was there“. I would recommend anything Wade Davis writes and I would certainly recommend this book.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

An heroic failure.

While I found the story illuminating and uplifting at times, like others, I found the use of American idioms for dates and other figures of speech irritating. As this was essentially a story of British explorers at the time of the Raj it just seemed wrong and very jarring. However, the holistic consideration of the lives of those concerned gave the characters depth and allowed the modern reader a glimpse into a lost world. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in history and exploration as well as those interested in the human condition.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Well worth the effort.

Facinating read from start to finish with the background stories giving an appreciation of the players. The book also lets you realise how inept and chauvinistic the privileged classes were. Its a shame the few talented climbers amongst them had to suffer the consequences. While listening I kept wondering what of those just as traumatised foot solders returning from the Great War hoping to rebuild their lives but having to work while these privileged toffs jolly about mountains for therapy.

I hadn’t realised until now how W E Bowman’s ‘The Ascent of Rum Doodle’ masterpiece so closely parodied the bumbling Everest expeditions of that period. Never the less, a great listen and well narrated... apart from the grinding Welsh place name pronunciations that is. I wonder if the Tibetans think the Himalayan names are being mangled as well.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

An Everest geeks paradise

Well written, interwoven story. 30 hours well spent! I doubt you are reading this unless you are interested in the history of Everest, and if you are this book is wonderful.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Amazing historical tour de force

What did you like most about Into the Silence?

It gave a detailed historical background to the Everest expeditions of the 1920s, including the wartime experience of the main participants. This brought the famous names to life, allowing the listener to identify with their struggles.
.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Into the Silence?

It is hard to choose just one, but some of the descriptions of the first world war left me shocked and stunned; the writing was so vivid that I felt I was there.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

I was irritated at the mispronounciation of most of the French place names, and also at the American style of saying dates (eg October one, rather than the first of October). But the pace was good and the speech clear..

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

The film has already been made! John Noel's Epic of Everest, made by one of the participants in the 1924 expedition, has just been remastered and released.

Any additional comments?

The only reason I am givng four stars and not five is that sometimes the details of the mountain geography were rather repetitive and confusing; this might have been easier to cope with in print, where you can go back a page or two to check things. But this is a minor criticism.
I would urge anyone nervous of the length of the book to go ahead; it is full of detail, sometimes quite difficult to retain, but at the end I felt I had lived through the whole experience. I think this book will stay with me long after most works of fiction have gone out of my mind.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing achievement

This is such interesting material, and covers so much half-familiar material. It is very detailed, and very long, but an excellent lockdown book. It has inspired a lot of back-up internet searching. I was quite glad to get to the end, though, and start something else.

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