In this gripping and inspirational book, Jamling Norgay interweaves the story of his Everest summit during the infamously deadly 1996 season with the first real account of his father Tenzing Norgay's historic first ascent with Edmund Hillary in 1953. For Jamling, the climb was a journey of danger and of discovery. Discovery of the spiritual heritage of the Sherpa tradition, of his father's past and of the obsession that makes men and women risk their lives to summit the tallest peak on earth.
A classic of mountaineering literature, this is a compelling and emotional account of two extraordinary ascents, and of the unique relationship between a father and son.
'As profoundly uplifting as it is disturbing, Jamling Tenzing Norgay's revealing account of his quest to understand what led his father to first climb Everest succeeds in every way' Galen Rowell, adventure photojournalist and mountaineer.
Jamling Tenzing Norgay is the son of Tenzing Norgay, who, with Sir Edmund Hillary, was the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, or Jomolungma, as we call it in Tibetan. In this book he tells the story of his participation in the successful ascent of Everest in 1996. Although generally Tibetans do not attempt to scale the peaks of mountains, being content to cross the passes that characterize journeys in Tibet, Jamling Tenzing Norgay takes a very Tibetan view of the enterprise-he regards it as a pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage on the one hand in tribute to his renowned and courageous father, but also because of the traditional Tibetan sense that such mountains are the abodes of divine beings.
Of course, pilgrimage is often regarded as a physical counter- part to the spiritual way of life. Both require a special attitude, careful preparation, a determination not to give up whatever the cost, courage to overcome whatever obstacles get in the way, and caution in the face of danger. Members of mountaineering teams become acutely aware of their dependence on their com- panions and at the same time their own responsibility towards them.
Nearly five years have passed since the disturbing cascade of events that has come to be known as the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Hundreds of thousands of words on the subject have been committed to print in the interim. The most recent account of the tragedy, Touching My Father's Soul, by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, is, by my rough calculation, the seventeenth book to be published about it. A half- decade after the fact, one would be forgiven for wondering why anybody other than the most obsessive Everest fanatic should bother reading yet another account of that infamous season on the world's highest mountain.
But Jamling's book should be read it is in fact among the best of the bunch. There is much to marvel at in these pages. It taught me a great deal.
Jamling was the Climbing Leader of the 1996 expedition that made the hugely popular IMAX film Everest. Although most of the other accounts of the Everest disaster were written by men and women who, like Jamling, witnessed the catastrophe first- hand, this is the only one authored by a Sherpa-the Buddhist people whose homeland surrounds Mount Everest, and who have played a singular, utterly crucial role in the great peak's mountaineering history since the British first ventured onto its flanks in 1921.
Climbing Everest has always been an exceedingly hazardous undertaking, and the toll in Sherpa lives has from the beginning been disproportionately high-in large part because the non- Sherpa climbers responsible for hiring them have routinely subjected their Sherpa employees to significantly greater risks than they have taken themselves. Nevertheless, this is just the second book about Himalayan mountaineering written from a Sherpa's point of view. The only other, published thirty-seven years ago, has long been out of print and is now difficult to find. That book, as it happens, is the autobiography of Jamling's father, the late, world-renowned Tenzing Norgay.
On May 29, 1953, it was Tenzing who, in the company of a New Zealand beekeeper name of Ed Hillary, made the first ascent of Everest. The 1996 tragedy provides the narrative architecture that gives shape to Touching My Father's Soul, but, as this title suggests, Jamling's book is to no small degree about his larger- than-life father and the complicated, emotionally charged bond they shared. Its publication seems especially propitious now that Tenzing's autobiography, Tiger of the Snows, has vanished from bookstore shelves.
In the heady months that followed his 1953 Everest climb, Tenzing was catapulted to the loftiest reaches of celebrity. He was lionized around the globe as one of the preeminent heroes of the post-World War II era. The newly crowned queen of England awarded the thirty-nine-year-old Sherpa the George Medal, the greatest honor that could be bestowed on a non- citizen of the United Kingdom. Feted throughout the world, he was befriended by the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
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