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In Climbing Days, Dan Richards is on the trail of his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century. For years, Dorothy and her husband, I. A. Richards, remained mysterious to Dan, but the chance discovery of her 1935 memoir, Climbing Days, leads him on a journey. Perhaps, in the mountains, he can meet them halfway?Following in the pair's footholds, Dan begins to travel and climb across Europe, using Dorothy's book as a guide. Learning the ropes in Wales and Scotland, scrambling in the Lake District, scaling summits in Spain and Switzerland, he closes in on the serrate pinnacle of Ivor and Dorothy's climbing lives, the mighty Dent Blanche in the high Alps of Valais.What emerges is a beautiful portrait of a trailblazing woman, up to now lost to history - but also a book about that eternal question: why do people climb mountains?
Sixteen of their stories - sometimes published under the name of a male relative, sometimes under anonymous bylines such as "a Lady" - are here recovered and collected for the first time.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
The stories we tell, published or otherwise, condition our mountain experiences in practice and reinforce cultural memory and representation. Yet, as this book and the authors within it set out to demonstrate, if we look beyond the boundaries of this ‘singular white history’ there is a rich diversity of stories to tell. This volume contributes to a growing body of scholarship that calls for a heterogeneity of voices in mountain memoir genres. For the first time, this diverse scholarship interrogates how mountaineering literary and media culture impact bodies, spaces, and places, in order to nuance how commodification intersects across social categories and is embodied in multi-dimensiona...
What did it mean to be a ‘rebel woman’ in the interwar years? Taking the form of a multiple biography, this book traces the struggles, passions and achievements of a set of ‘fearlessly determined’ women who stopped at nothing to make their mark in the traditionally masculine environments of mountaineering, politics, engineering and journalism. From the motorist Claudia Parsons to the ‘star’ reporter Margaret Lane, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, the women charted in this book challenged the status quo in all walks of life, alongside writing vivid, eye-witness accounts of their adventures. Recovering their voices across a range of texts including novels, poems, journalism and diaries, Rebel women between the wars reveals their inch by inch gains won through courageous and sometimes controversial and dangerous actions.
First published in 1973, Women on the Rope provides the first consecutive story of the ‘feminine share in mountain adventure’, a share which has grown from tiny beginnings in 1808 to a level at which women have won their place at Everest expeditions. Cicely Williams provides a book which combines exact and detailed knowledge of a little-known chapter of human enterprise with that zest for life and love of mountains that have brought her so many friends. This is a book for mountaineers, for social historians, and for the fireside connoisseur of good storytelling.
There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland’s ‘Houses of Joy’ to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl’s writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?
The second edition of this classic guidebook by Kev Reynolds on walking and trekking in the Alps. This book is a definitive guide to the many thousands of possible routes, with a geographical span that ranges from the Maritime Alps of southern France to the Julians of Slovenia, from Italy's Gran Paradiso to the little-known Türnitzer Alps of eastern Austria, and from the ice-bound giants of the Bernese Oberland to the green rolling Kitzbüheler Alps and the bizarre towers of the Dolomites of South Tirol, showing the amazing diversity of this wonderful mountain chain. There are walks to suit every taste: gentle and undemanding, long and tough, and everything in between. Written by Britain's most respected authority on the Alps, this is a fully updated edition of this important book.
The Black Cuillin is an exhilarating account of mountaineering in the Isle of Skye and the extraordinary folk who flocked to the 'British Alps'. Not simply a climbing compendium but a social history of the island, its mountains and it's people. ‘ …exhaustively knowledgeable and scintillatingly written… ’ JIM PERRIN 'A major work of research and history―not only of climbing but also of social developments and the significant personalities involved in events surrounding Skye and the Highlands over the last two centuries. A must read for anyone with an interest in the history of the island and Scotland'. DENNIS GRAY