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.

"The Orphan Master's Son" and More Pulitzer Prize Winners

After 2012's odd omission of a Fiction winner, this year's Pulitzer Prizes delivered on all fronts: Nonfiction to Gilbert King for Devil in the Grove, History to Fredrik Logevall for Embers of War, Biography to Tom Reiss for The Black Count, Poetry to Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap, Drama to Ayad Akhtar for Disgraced--and Fiction honors to Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master's Son, described by the judges as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."

In a piece here on why we'd picked Johnson's novel as our spotlight for the Best Book of the Month (over, I might add, John Green's phenomenal Fault in Our Stars) when it was released in January of last year, I shared how our team's obsession with this book in December 2011 took a strange turn when we heard that Kim Jon-il had died. The outpouring of news about and propaganda from North Korea felt like an alarming intrusion into reality of the fictional world we'd been compulsively descending into each night, a searing reminder "that the surreal, brutal universe Johnson evokes continues to unfold just across the Pacific."

As North Korea's new leader incites increasingly nervous debates about his true threat level, Johnson's novel feels all the more relevant and haunting. I keep finding myself drawn to Internet accounts from escapees and satellite images of the camps where a (roughly) estimated 3.5 million have so far been killed. No other modern nation is a more brutally constructed Orwellian fiction than the DPRK, and it's easy to see how Johnson became obsessed with questions about how it must be to live within this gulag of the mind. He wrote about this experience for Amazon Books:

I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.

If you want to understand North Koreans--and how they have been conditioned to think about Americans--start with The Orphan Master's Son.

See new and past Pultizer Prize winners at Amazon Books.

Happy Birthday Mr. Darcy: "Pride and Prejudice" turns 200

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Here are some other fun facts about Pride and Prejudice: It was originally called First Impressions and, under that name, it was rejected for publication. Sixteen years later -- having undergone significant revisions including a title change -- Pride and Prejudice became Austen's second published novel.

In the two centuries since, Pride and Prejudice has done more than raise young women's expectations for what a man should be. (After all, even children of the '80s have to admit that Mr. Darcy is the original Lloyd Dobbler.) It has consistently been considered one of Jane Austen's most popular books. It has been a consistent part of English class reading curriculums. It has spawned multiple film and television series adaptations and interpolations. It's been given an artistic update as a comic book by Marvel. It has even been translated into a board game, a trivia game and a casual computer game.

But perhaps the true wonder, and a phenomenon unmatched by other classics, is the ongoing reimagining of the story by modern authors. This classic story has not only withstood the test of time, but it has, in a way, grown as new authors hone in on specific characters or offer creative new approaches to the tale itself.

Whether you've always longed to read the chapter after the last, or you've wanted to know more about Mr. Darcy's younger sister, or you've dreamed of Mr. Darcy as a vampire, or if you've imagined fiesty Elizabeth's reaction to zombies invading the English countryside, plenty of authors have answered your call.

There are many, many Pride and Prejudice-related books to choose from, but here are a few standouts.

Be the Super Bowl Party MVP

Attention sports fans. As you know, Super Bowl Sunday is Feb. 3. Whether you're throwing a party or just attending one, you know there is only one competition that comes close to the one that will be on the screen. No, it's not who can eat the most hot wings in 2 minutes or who wins rock-scissors-paper for the inevitable half-time beer run. It's who has managed to cram the most otherwise meaningless information into their noggin. Of course!

You can never know too much obscure trivia in situations like these. And we've got you covered with a few handy books guaranteed to help you hold your own in stat-rattling conversations.

Self-described as "the ultimate reference to the ultimate game," The Ultimate Super Bowl Book: A Complete Reference to the Stats, Stars, and Stories Behind Football's Biggest Game -- and Why the Best Team Won leaves little room to misinterpret its content. Explore the games themselves with analysis and play-by-plays and learn about the star players and coaches for each Super Bowl.

 

 

Who currently holds what record? Who broke which record when? Study up on NFL records and stats with NFL Record & Fact Book 2012: The Official National Football League Record and Fact Book. Updated annually, it's considered essential reading for die-hard football fans.

 

 

 

You'll blow your fellow fans' minds when you're able to offer insights that cross-reference baseball, basketball and more. Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won is co-written by a behavioral economist and a Sports Illustrated writer. You'll have your (forgive the off-sport pun) bases covered with this one.

2013 Academy Award Nominees Light on Reading

The 2013 Oscar nominations are here. Although the number of films based on books is lower than it has been in years past, several adaptations did make the cut. Per the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Best (Book-Based) Picture nominees are:

Lincoln
Based in part on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin'sTeam of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, this star-studded drama about the final months of the 16th American president's life leads the race with 12 impressive nominations.

Best Picture

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones

Best Supporting Actress: Sally Field

Best Director: Steven Spielberg

Best Adapted Screenplay: Tony Kushner

Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski

Best Costume Design: Joanna Johnston

Film Editing: Michael Kahn

Best Original Score: John Williams

Best Production Design: Rick Carter and Jim Erickson

Best Sound Mixing: Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins

 

Life of Pi
Competing with Lincoln for Best Motion Picture - Drama at the 2013 Golden Globes as well, this spectacularly visual adaptation is the Academy's second most nominated film this year, earning 11 nods-- none in acting categories.

Best Picture

Best Original Song: "Pi’s Lullaby"

Best Director: Ang Lee

Best Adapted Screenplay: David Magee

Best Cinematography: Claudio Miranda

Film Editing:Tim Squyres

Best Original Score: Mychael Danna

Best Production Design: David Gropman and Anna Pinnock

Best Sound Editing: Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton

Best Sound Mixing: Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin

Best Visual Effects: Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott

 

 

Les Miserables
This filmic adaptation of the Broadway adaptation ties Silver Linings Playbook for third with eight nominations, including an original song sung by Hugh Jackman that was new even to fans of previous soundtracks.

Best Picture

Best Actor: Hugh Jackman

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway

Best Original Song: "Suddenly"

Best Costume Design: Paco Delgado

Makeup and Hairstyling: Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell

Best Production Design: Eve Stewart and Anna Lynch-Robinson

Best Sound Mixing: Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes

 

Silver Linings Playbook
This rom-com-drama is noteworthy at the very least for its pre-show sweep of the acting categories -- the first time one film has had nominations in all four since Warren Beatty, Maureen Stapleton, Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton vied on behalf of Reds in 1982. (Only Stapleton won.)

Best Picture

Best Actor: Bradley Cooper

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence

Best Supporting Actor: Robert De Niro

Best Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver

Best Director: David O. Russell

Best Adapted Screenplay: David O. Russell

Film Editing: Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers

Beyond the top categories, Tolstoy's epic Victorian masterpiece Anna Karenina received four nominations (Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design), while Peter Jackson's take on Tolkien's The Hobbit was acknowledged in only three categories (Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects).

Bonus Fun fact: All of the Best Production Design nominees were from movies based on books.