“Survive!” by Peter DeLeo: The author gives a first-person account of how he crashed his bush plane in a forested area of the Sierra Nevada in late November 1994 and hobbled into a diner 30 miles away 12 days later. It’s an unbelievable mountain journey without maps, trails, food, shelter or proper clothing as DeLeo faces waist-deep snow drifts, freezing temperatures that plummeted at night, a blizzard, steep climbs and a bear — all with a shattered left ankle, a …
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“Savage Summit” by Jennifer Jordan: This tortured tale follows five women through extraordinary achievements and cataclysmic failures in their pursuit of the world’s second-highest peak, K2 in the Himalayas. Until last summer, they were the only women to stand atop the 28,268-foot mountain; they also had been dead at least six years. That last fact is just one insurmountable obstacle for Jordan in her quest to expose the sexist world of mountain climbing and its forgotten heroines. The former National …
“American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: A little more levity would have well served the authors of this intentionally epic tale. But spending 25 years working on one biography, as Sherwin did, seems to force a more serious tone than living your life under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation. This book on the life of the father of the atomic bomb has the perfect title: It takes a Promethean …