Omnivoracious

A Life on the Edge: An Interview with Jim Whittaker

Nobody has a better business card than Jim Whittaker.

The business side is low-key: A simple, stylized mountain logo, his name, and the words “Adventurer, Author, Speaker.” But turn it over and you'll find a picture of Whittaker--or "Big Jim," as he was known then and ever since--standing astride the summit of the tallest mountain on the planet, ice axe raised over his head in what must have been a heady mix of triumph, joy, and disbelief (relief would have to wait until after the descent). He was--is--the first American to accomplish the feat, and either the 10th or 11th overall, depending on how you're counting. Nawang Gombu, who took that picture, was Whittaker's climbing partner that day--May 1, 1963, 50 years ago tomorrow--and as Big Jim tells it, they chose to summit as a team, together.

Whittaker's and Gombu's achievement wasn't the only highlight of the expedition. Three weeks later, on another spine of Everest’s three-sided pyramid, Thomas Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld drove a new route up the perilous West Ridge, over the summit, and down Whittaker's South Col route, pausing overnight to bivouac at 28 thousand feet. It was the first traverse of an eight-thousand meter peak, but they had no choice—their route up provided no way back down. As an incredible feat of daring and perserverance, mountaineers consider it to be one of the greatest accomplishments in Everest (and climbing) history. Even a half-century later, it has been rarely repeated.

May 1, 1963, was a life-changing moment for Whittaker: He suddenly found himself befriended by the Kennedys--vacationing with the family and hosting them in his own home--and later ran RFK’s campaign in Washington State; he became CEO of REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated--he was previously its first full-time employee); he led two expeditions to K2, the second of which put the first Americans atop the world’s second-highest peak; and he returned to Everest in 1990 to lead a team comprised of Cold War antagonists to the top. And those are just the highlights.

But the unassuming kid from West Seattle stayed the same. He simply feels amazed at his own fortune: lucky.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary, Mountaineers Books has published extraordinary new editions of Whittaker’s autobiography, A Life on the Edge, and Hornbein’s account of his and Unsoeld’s epic climb, Everest: The West Ridge.  Both are oversized hardcovers, filled with incredible images (many by Whittaker’s wife, Dianne Roberts, who photographed their K2 expeditions and has an amazing business card of her own), with new forewords by climber/authors Ed Viesturs and Jon Krakauer. These are essential books for mountaineers, armchair or otherwise.

When you look at pictures of these men, they are almost always smiling (especially Unsoeld), even as some of them are ported down mountains without so many of the toes they started up with. Certainly there are grittier images available, and maybe those are just the pictures they selected for the books, but I'd like to think not. When asked why he was so determined to climb Everest, British climber George Mallory famously said, "Because it's there." Whittaker, Tom Hornbein, and the rest of the 1963 expedition didn't climb the mountain because it was there; they climbed it because they were here, present on what Big Jim calls “this magical planet.” They were living with purpose, and they knew it. Jim and Dianne still are.

Though he’s been busy with media and events to mark the date, Jim and Dianne made time to stop by the Brave Horse Tavern in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood for a chat about Everest, the Kennedys, and more. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

(Click here to learn more about Everest, K2, and other classics of mountaineering—many of which are published by Mountaineers books--and visit Jim Whittaker’s web site for more information, including additional photographs from his personal collection. )

Jon Foro: You were specifically picked for the Everest team due to your Mt. Rainier experience. Did that prepare you the way you thought it might?

Jim Whittaker: I guided on Rainier through college, for three summers, and I climbed a lot, and I was on the ski patrol. So I'd done a lot of different things in the outdoors. (On McKinley, we had an accident--one of our team got a broken ankle and it took us a while to get down.  I meant to ask Norman [Dyhrenfurth, the expedition leader] whether that was what really drew his attention, because it was on nation-wide news that we were stranded on the summit of Mt. McKinley.)

Yeah, it did, it did. The thing is, the Northwest has got the glaciers. The East Coast, The middle states, even the Rockies don't have the glaciers. But here, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, they've got snow and ice--everything that Mount Everest has except that extra fourteen thousand feet. We have the crevasses, the seracs, we've got the weather--incredibly bad weather could hit.... So it was a great training ground. So I went over fairly confident--maybe overconfident--that we could knock off the mountain.

Penned by Presidents

They are international superstars, and yet they are public servants. We are united by the ideal they represent, but we are often divided by the policies they enact. As the 2012 election concludes, take a look beyond the ballots and past the process.

Explore President Obama’s inspiring upbringing. See President George W. Bush’s choices in a whole new way. Discover President Clinton’s perception of his own complexities. Get a rare glimpse at President George H.W. Bush’s personal side. And follow President Reagan’s road from home to Hollywood to the White House.

Written by the five most recent Americans to be known as the Leader of the Free World, the Commander in Chief, Mr. President and (to a select few) POTUS, here are five books that transcend politics to help us understand the human beings who have occupied the Oval Office.

 

 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

"That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind.

In fact, I can recall only one story that dealt explicitly with the subject of race; as I got older, it would be repeated more often, as if it captured the essence of the morality tale that my father's life had become."

 

 

Decision Points by George W. Bush

"The decision process was all-consuming. I thought about it, talked about it, analyzed it, and prayed about it. I had a philosophy I wanted to advance, and I was convinced I could build a team worthy of the presidency. I had the financial security to provide for my family, win or lose. Ultimately, the decisive factors were less tangible. I felt a drive to do more with my life, to push my potential and test my skills at the highest level."

 

 

My Life by Bill Clinton

"Perhaps if Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had lived, things would have been different. Perhaps if Humphrey had used the information about Nixon's interference with the Paris peace talks, things would have been different. Perhaps not. Regardless, those of us who believed that the good of the 1960s outweighted the bad would fight on, still fired by the heroes and dreams of our youth."

 

 

All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings by George H.W. Bush

"Dear Mum, Well today was the big day—in fact one of the biggest thrills of my life, I imagine. We marched down to the #1 hanger and they read out the names for the first hop. I was in. I went down, got my gear, and then consulted the board. Plane P-18 1st hop—2nd hop Plane P-18 check pilot Boyle. I immediately went around trying to find out what kind of a check Boyle is. All I got was 'pretty tough'. This was quite disheartening."

 

 

An American Life: The Autobiography by Ronald Reagan

"If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.

I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go—and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression."

Bill O'Reilly Takes on History for Kids

These days Bill O'Reilly is a widely known T.V. personality and author but what many may forget is that he was a high school history teacher before he became a household name. Adapted from Killing Lincoln, his bestselling book for adults, O'Reilly brings the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln to life for young readers in a new book, Lincoln's Last Days.

 This action-packed history has fascinating vintage photographs on every spread and is a great way to introduce the excitement of reading non-fiction to young readers.  In the exclusive Q&A below O'Reilly shares his favorite photo from the book and you can see a couple other images  both after the Q&A and in the video of O'Reilly reading from the book.

Q: What aspects of this story did you discover for the first time when you dug into the research?

O'Reilly: The research for Killing Lincoln turned up some amazing things about the assassin John Wilkes Booth. His fiancée was secretly dating the president's son Robert Todd Lincoln, and this might have caused Booth to fixate on the president even more.  Also, Booth almost got away after the murder and the manhunt for him is a real action drama.

Q: What was your favorite part of American history to teach?

O'Reilly: When I taught high school history to seniors and juniors, I would emphasize the greatness of men like Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln.  I would tell personal stories about those great men to make them seem as real people to the students, instead of just myths.   That's why I wrote Lincoln's Last Days—so that young Americans could learn about the Civil War and President Lincoln in an exciting way.

Q: There are so many photos in Lincoln’s Last Days – do you have a favorite?

O'Reilly: The profile photo of Abraham Lincoln on page 59 is my all-time favorite of him.

Q: What was your favorite book as a child?

O'Reilly: As a kid in fourth grade, I read all the Hardy Boy books in school.  But I wasn't supposed to.  I hide them behind the pages of a huge geography book.  So while I was supposed to be reading about Turkey, I was actually reading about Frank and Joe Hardy solving mysteries.

Q: What’s your most prized possession?

O'Reilly: My most prized material possession is a photograph signed by Abraham Lincoln.  The image of him was taken by Matthew Brady, and the president signed it at the bottom.  A superb piece of history.

Bill O'Reilly Reading from Lincoln's Last Days:

Marvelous Books on Marilyn Monroe

"It was a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world." –Marilyn Monroe

Since Marilyn Monroe’s death on August 5, 1962, at age 36, hundreds of books have emerged, some celebrating her legacy, others scrutinizing her life in obsessive detail. Controversies still swirl, but we know many of the facts: She grew up in foster homes, devoutly religious and shy. She married her first husband at age 15, and when he went off to war, she started modeling and found the power in a snug sweater to keep up troop morale. She worked her curves on and off camera, propelling herself from wholesome girl next door to ultimate platinum vamp—a transformation most stunningly depicted in David Willis’s Metamorphosis. We learn from Marilyn in Fashion that she often worked with designers to create looks to enhance the Marilyn image, defining sophisticated '50s style. She had dozens of affairs (some public, others deeply private), but Norman Mailer noted—in his seminal 1973 biography, Marilyn, later paired with Bern Stern’s photographs in a lavish Taschen tome—that her “greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera.”

Much of her life beyond her legend remains enigmatic. Marilyn famously said she didn’t want to be rich, she just wanted to be wonderful, and too often she didn't realize that she already was. On film, we saw Marilyn luminously at home in her body: Lawrence Schiller, who photographed her on the sets of Let's Make Love and Something's Got to Give, describes her in Marilyn & Me as a tough, ambitious agent in her own career and a self-assured model.

But her incandescent confidence was a veneer barely concealing her vulnerability and self-doubt, a conflict masterfully dramatized by Joyce Carol Oates in her novel Blonde. Marilyn grew to deeply resent and resist the prison of the sex symbol role in which she had cast herself. She longed to be taken seriously, and despite her stutter and deepening battles with addiction and depression, she devoted herself to becoming a great dramatic actress (beyond the comic genius so evident in Some Like It Hot), and she showed every sign of getting there.

She made up for a missed education by devouring books, writing poetry, and developing intense friendships and affairs with artists, intellectuals, and, most (in)famously, politicians like the Kennedys. Some believe that her autobiography, My Story, was altered after her death to the point that it’s not entirely reliable, but her genuine wit and intelligence is undeniable. Lois Banner's MM—Personal offers the most revealing look inside her everyday life (photos and art and other objects that mattered to her), while we see the introspective, intellectually hungry Marilyn most directly in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, which culminates in a spread of her most cherished books.

 Many assert that Marilyn was coming into her own as an artist and learning to speak with her own voice just as her life ended. Adam Braver's new novel, Misfit, centering on her last weekend at Frank Sinatra's Lake Tahoe resort, brilliantly imagines her struggle to create an authentic identity and the tragic consequences.  Several writers and historians contend, citing convincing detail, that she was decisively silenced: Donald Wolfe makes a meticulously researched    homicide case in his nonfiction work, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, and J.I. Baker's The Empty Glass is a breathlessly paranoid noir thriller that draws on much of the same evidence.

I feel the full loss of her when I imagine how a well, vibrant Marilyn—a woman who pushed the cultural boundaries of the 1950s until they strained at their seams—might have expressed her creative and intellectual self over the course of a full lifetime. Her husband Arthur Miller observed that "to have survived,  she  would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” Lois Banner describes in Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox how Marilyn's private funeral, arranged by Joe DiMaggio (whom Marilyn had planned to remarry that same week) ended with fans rushing her grave "in one big wave," tearing apart every floral tribute in their frenzied desire for souvenirs—much like people had tried to take pieces of her dress or hair when she was alive. Marilyn gave too much to deserve that. Books make much more marvelous souvenirs. –Mari Lynne Malcolm

See more of our favorite books about Marilyn Monroe.

Trend Stetting 19: Precision Shooting

Marjorie Garber, professor of English and visual and environmental studies at Harvard, does not rest on her laurels. She has authored or coauthored more than a dozen books on a strange and impressive range of topics (Shakespeare After All, Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, and Dog Love, among others), and her latest essay collection has a stark, striking cover and a great deal to say.

Though it clocks in at right around 200 pages—practically emaciated in the annals of academic publishing—Loaded Words is far from a light read. It may take you a couple of chapters, as it did me, to ease into the dense prose: Dr. Garber's decades of scholarship lend themselves to a thicket of citations, footnotes, and quotation marks around common terms to indicate their grander significance ("data," "beliefs," "our"). But if you stay the course, she will prove very approachable, even delightful, in her unabashed passion for language and history ("I own Hamlet T-shirts in a variety of fetching styles").

Consider the lovely passage in which she first meets the rare Cranach Press edition of Hamlet, published in 1930: "When I saw the book, I was enraptured…I touched the handmade paper. I looked at the type and the typeface…. It was like falling for a movie star, or a rock star." Garber calls this her "boing-boing" feeling, and anyone who considers literature a tactile experience knows exactly what that means. I've fallen hard for a few handsome books in my day.

Loaded Words also shines when the author brings contemporary politics and culture into the conversation, as in her insightful essays on critic F.O. Matthiessen, who counted himself as married to his longtime partner 75 years before Prop 8 hit the ballot; and "Our Genius Problem," wherein the modern "genius" designation extends to football coaches and entrepreneurs as often as to scientific and literary pioneers.

You'll need your thinking cap to navigate Loaded Words—or perhaps your velvet thinking tam. If you set it at just the right jaunty angle, you'll be in for a treat.

"The Day in Its Color": Pictures of a Lost Continent

In 1938, erstwhile businessman Charles Cushman snapped an image of the Golden Gate Bridge using the relatively new Kodachrome color film. It would be the first of over 14,000 frames of indelible Americana--people, urban scenes, and landscapes--that he would capture over a 30-year cross-country odyssey.

Unlike Walker Evans or Henri Cartier-Bresson, who chose similar subject matter to wide acclaim, Cushman was by no means considered an artist or professional, for no larger reason than that nobody knew who he was. Besides, color photogaphy had something of a gauche reputation in the higher-minded circles. Cushman was doing this for himself, and he was so far underground that his collection was only recently "discovered" and archived when he donated his photographs to Indiana University, his alma mater. (See Vivian Maier for another recently celebrated amateur "street photographer.") 

The Day in Its Color (Oxford University Press) serves as a companion piece to the Cushman archives, a collection of over 150 color prints contextualized with commentary on setting, period, and photographic equipment and technique. And it is fascinating, not only for the beautiful frankness of the portraits and street-life shots, but for the way the reproductions of the super-saturated photographs breathe reality into images of a truly vanished world. A shot of a rickety "confectionary cart" in the muddy streets of Chicago (surely a predecessor to Windy City "street cheese") would look pre-industrial if not for the color, while a 1939 portrait of Cushman himself at the rim of the Grand Canyon (dressed for leisure in a suit, fedora, and a remarkably short tie) gives you an idea what Sam Spade might look like on vacation. It's occasionally jarring, like seeing color footage of World War II for the first time.

But beyond the archaic curiousity of the set, Cushman knew what he wanted from his camera, and the best shots speak to an opportunistic readiness to capture the ephemeral moments of a rapidly vanishing culture. Select images from the book, including the ones described above, are available after the jump.

The House Divides: The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC, and the beginning of the Civil War. And there's probably no more poignant evocation of the war than from the opening of the Ken Burns series The Civil War:

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.

American homes became headquarters, American churches and schoolhouses sheltered the dying, and huge foraging armies swept across American farms and burned American towns. Americans slaughtered one another wholesale, right here in America in their own cornfields and peach orchards, along familiar roads and by waters with old American names.

According to biographer Edward Ball, "something like 65,000 books have been published on the war, more than one a day since it ended." (On Amazon, you can find over 15,000 history books on the subject alone). It's an endlessly fascinating subject, too, whether you measure interest by the number of books, movies, and documentaries made about the war, or the number of visitors that show up to Civil War re-enactments and living history displays around the country.