Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer's famous account of the 1996 Everest disaster, Into Thin Air, will remember Beck Weathers: the gregarious Texan climber who went snow-blind in the Death Zone and spent a night out in the open during a blizzard that took the lives of nine colleagues. Miraculously, he survived.Even then, Weathers was effectively left for dead. Having staggered back to the tents at Camp Four the following morning, so extreme was his frostbite that fellow survivors assumed he would never make it back down the mountain. But, calling upon reserves of courage and tenacity he didn't know he had Weathers began the slow descent, to a point at which the next stage of the drama could unfold: the highest rescue by helicopter ever attempted.This is Weathers' story: a heartstoppingly exciting and ultimately very moving account of tremendous hardship and courage, and of the toughest challenge of all - reconcilliation with a family he'd taken for granted for too long.
