The World Beneath Their Feet

Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas

De: Scott Ellsworth

Narrado por: Scott Ellsworth

Winner of the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award for Best History/Biography

A saga of survival, technological innovation, and breathtaking human physical achievement -- all set against the backdrop of a world headed toward war -- that became one of the most compelling international dramas of the 20th century.
As tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was already raging across the Himalayas. Teams of mountaineers from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States were all competing to be the first to climb the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest and K2. Unlike climbers today, they had few photographs or maps, no properly working oxygen systems, and they wore leather boots and cotton parkas. Amazingly, and against all odds, they soon went farther and higher than anyone could have imagined.

And as they did, their story caught the world's attention. The climbers were mobbed at train stations, and were featured in movies and plays. James Hilton created the mythical land of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, while an English eccentric named Maurice Wilson set out for Tibet in order to climb Mount Everest alone. And in the darkened corridors of the Third Reich, officials soon discovered the propaganda value of planting a Nazi flag on top of the world's highest mountains

Set in London, New York, Germany, and in India, China, and Tibet, The World Beneath Their Feet is a story not only of climbing and mountain climbers, but also of passion and ambition, courage and folly, tradition and innovation, tragedy and triumph. Scott Ellsworth tells a rollicking, real-life adventure story that moves seamlessly from the streets of Manhattan to the footlights of the West End, deadly avalanches on Nanga Parbat, rioting in the Kashmir, and the wild mountain dreams of a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary and a young Sherpa runaway called Tenzing Norgay.

Climbing the Himalayas was the Greatest Generation's moonshot-one that was clouded by the onset of war and then, incredibly, fully accomplished. A gritty, fascinating history that promises to enrapture fans of Hampton Sides, Erik Larson, Jon Krakauer, and Laura Hillenbrand, The World Beneath Their Feet brings this forgotten story back to life.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"In his lively new book, The World Beneath Their Feet, Scott Ellsworth profiles the single-minded climbers who scaled the Himalayas' tallest peaks in the 1930s...a gripping history."—The Economist

"Mr. Ellsworth provides a chronological appendix of expeditions, a glossary of mountaineering terms and a top-shelf collection of descriptive endnotes. He has done excellent primary research, particularly with German sources... Mr. Ellsworth's revisionist touches help 21st-century readers see the Sherpas as individuals and give the traditional narrative of Himalayan conquest a fairer reading through the lens of imperialism."—Gregory Crouch, WSJ

"A thrilling new account."—National Geographic

"Like if Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air met Lauren Hillenbrand's Unbroken, it's an inviting and engrossing read."—Sports Illustrated

"It is a fine piece of writing, filled with drama, courage, endeavour and, at times, it is easy to put oneself on the mountainside experiencing the freezing gales whistling round one's tent."—Soldier Magazine

"Beautifully written."—Michigan Daily

"An exceptional account of trailblazing mountaineers who persevered during a turbulent time in history."—Booklist

"Vivid, novelistic prose."—Kirkus

"An excellent overview of mountaineering and exploration that will appeal to mountaineers and armchair adventurers."—Library Journal

Much needed perspective

This book is an important addition to the world of mountaineering writing. It places climbs and climbers in their historical and geopolitical contexts. Mountaineers are portrayed as they usually choose to portray themselves - as acted upon by the vicissitudes of the times but also as actors themselves (Nazis, imperialists, racists, elitists) - complex characters who did terrible things but who just as often engaged in feats of selfless bravery.

My only criticism is there are an awful lot of idiosyncratic pronunciations - and some truly execrable German - that are distracting. It’s difficult to understand why someone who writes a book of this scope and is on faculty at Michigan does not use standard American OR British pronunciations of place names (pronouncing the “th” in “Kathmandu” which I have never heard before) or even ordinary words, and can’t get his mouth around a very pronounceable German word like “Tausender”. I didn’t mind the rest of the narration as others did - he does sound a bit like a sports announcer - but that didn’t bother me anywhere near as much as so many productions do with layered sneering and snarky women and men doing ridiculous female voices. This was an honest if not a sophisticated production.

Monotone reading but a good story.

I wish the reader was not the author but a professional VO artist. A great subject matter though.

Bad narration

The narrator doesn’t know how to pronounce Darjeeling, Pasang Kikuli, Fritz Weissner and others. Not knowledgeable enough to narrate this book. Super annoying.

Failure brings success

I really liked the premise that a lot of failures by true gutsy adventurers helped pave the way for future successes. Nicely done. Narration very precise and greatly enunciated the material...I kept ..t h I n k I n g he may b. a ro bot.

excellent overview of high altitude climbing

wonderfully written and performed, the stories range from triumph to horror show but this overview of a long history is not one to pass up

Breathtaking, Beautiful, Brilliant

I’m not sorry to say that I ended this book with tears in my eyes, the storytelling and indeed the story itself are beyond words. If you have ever gazed upon a brilliant vista and wondered what the first people to see had coursing through their consciousness, or looked in wonder at a towering peak or distant shore. This is the book for you.

Not an overwhelming fan of the narration, the accents especially border on absurd, but it’s absolutely worth your time. You would think that a book that contains a great many French, German, and Nepalese names might have merited a touch more attention to the name. The reckless disregard for the pronunciation of such names and places is frustrating

Inspiring

Inspiring to the end, loved the dedication to caring about all of the people involved

Near fatal flaws

The World Beneath Their Feet is an uncomfortable mixture of good and bad attributes. Impeccably researched and told with dramatic flare, it is nevertheless impaired by bad grammar and monotonously amateurish composition and, as an audio book, by the most inept, often comical narration I've ever encountered.
If you've read some of my reviews already, you know that I'm prudish about English grammar. Writing is a demanding profession requiring a number of skills, among them mastery of the basic rules of the language. Scott Ellsworth evidently doesn't share this conviction, because his narrative is filled with grammatical solecisms such as split infinitives, but the dangling participial phrase is his favorite error, Since this is surely the most common mistake in contemporary speech as well as writing, perhaps he can be forgiven for this, but there's more.
The most striking characteristic of Ellsworth's writing is his affection for nonrestrictive subordinate phrases and clauses, most of them introduced by the relative pronoun, "who". While these constructions are not necessarily incorrect, they should be used sparingly and with care. Ellsworth scatters them indiscriminately throughout his writing. Combined with his idiosyncratic reading style, this tendency becomes irritating rather quickly. You don't have to be as fastidious as I am to begin cringing, whenever Ellsworth interrupts the flow of a perfectly good sentence with a sonorous "and who", followed by a long, convoluted subordinate clause. It's just not good style.
This brings up my next issue.. If Ellsworth weren't the book's author, I might attribute the strange lurching character of the audio version to his misunderstanding of its intent, but he must surely understand what he means to say. So I can't account for the way he pauses at inappropriate places and emphasizes words that need no emphasis. Maybe he speaks this way all the time.
Far more noticeable is the frequency with which Ellsworth mispronounces words. It's astonishing that someone could write a lengthy book like this one, filled with exotic words and terminology, and not take the time to discover how these should be pronounced. Mountaineering has introduced many foreign words to the language, many of German (or Swiss) origin, many others from Tibetan or Nepalese. I would be willing to bet that Ellsworth pronounces more of these incorrectly than he gets right. A prime example is the name of a well known Himalayan city: Darjeeling. One needn't be expert in history, geography, or even English to know that "ee" is always pronounced as a long vowel, as in "see" or "deep". A little more knowledge would reveal that the accent is on the second syllable. (Look it up!) Ellsworth pronounces it "DAR - jell - ing" with the accent on the first syllable and the second sounding like the product, Jello. And he does this over and over again in the scores of times that this name appears in the text. (At least he's consistent.) His German is execrable too, painful to hear! (By the way, he mispronounces "execrable", when this word appears in the text!) Ellsworth doesn't confine himself to technical terms and proper names. He massacres English words by the dozens, including common words and relatively sophisticated ones that don't occur very often. How he manages to know the meanings of these words and use them properly without having a better idea of how they're pronounced is beyond me.
Having pilloried Ellsworth for these aspects of his writing, I should recur to the good things about his book. It really is fascinating. Ellsworth presents a comprehensive and compelling history of Himalayan climbing, along with vivid biographies of the men and women who risked their lives (not to mention their fingers and toes) in order to conquer these daunting summits, His accounts of the climbs themselves are riveting and from time to time frightening, but always interesting. In spite of the flaws which I've mentioned, I never once considered putting the book/ recording down without finishing it. If you have any interest in mountaineering and its history - or, indeed, if you just want to experience vicariously some of the most exotic and challenging adventures ever undertaken, then I recommend The World Beneath Their Feet highly!