Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver's deeply researched and vigorously written Fallen Giants chronicles the evolution of Himalayan mountaineering since the late nineteenth century. Unlike previous surveys that view mountaineering from within the perspective of an “age of empire,” Fallen Giants brings a fresh critical perspective by focusing on the “expeditionary cultures” of Himalayan mountaineering.

Fallen Giants is comprehensive in scope, encyclopedic in detail, and based on an impressive range of sources, including private correspondence, expedition archives, interviews with climbers, and even references to Monty Python sketches. The authors provide a series of acute vignettes of expeditions and individual mountaineers, who are always situated in wider historical contexts. They provide excellent syntheses of the political dimensions of the British on Mount Everest, the Germans on Nanga Parbat, and the French on Annapurna. New material illuminates many important episodes, including the “New Frontier” rhetoric of the Kennedy administration and the first American ascent of Everest in 1963. The chronicle format has its limitations, but whenever climbing routes or lists of expedition members accumulate, they are always brought back to a larger context and broader argument.

Isserman and Weaver identify “three distinct eras in the history of Himalayan mountaineering: the age of empire, the golden age, and the age of extremes,” which were defined, respectively, by Mallory and Irvine's disappearance in 1924, Hillary and Tenzing's ascent in 1953, and the “Into Thin Air” disaster on Everest in 1996 (450). They present the central interpretive challenge of the book as a paradox: the expeditionary culture of the age of empire was bound up with assumptions of imperial destiny, white rule, and colonial arrogance, but it also nurtured qualities such as fellowship and responsibility to others. Moreover, the authors state, “to the extent that this book traces the eclipse of those qualities by the hypertrophied commercial individualism of the age of extremes, it is a tale of decline, a story of fallen giants in more than one sense” (xi).

The authors identify the “highest ideals of expeditionary culture” with the American attempt on K2 in 1953, a climb that featured a dramatic rescue and prompted Charlie Houston to write that “we entered the mountains as strangers, but we left as brothers” (314, 398). Bill Tilman and Charlie Houston, rather than Hillary and Tenzing, emerge as the heroes of Fallen Giants. Tilman supplies the fallen-giant motif to describe a hitherto unclimbed peak, and only Tilman, Eric Shipton, and George Mallory are labeled “fallen giants” after their death (vi, ix, 436). After climbing Kamet in a small party in 1931, Tilman and Shipton became advocates for smaller-scale expeditions on other peaks. During a British-American expedition with Houston in 1936, Tilman was elected leader by secret ballot and reached the summit of Nanda Devi. Tilman and Houston visited Nepal in 1950 with a party of friends, and their romantic description of Solu Khumbu becomes a point of reference for the book.

The expeditionary cultures of the “age of empire” and “golden age” were not distinct eras but overlapping positions that received varying levels of prominence until the 1970s. Before the Second World War, expeditions on K2, Nanga Parbat, and Kanchenjunga also experienced clashes between climbers, and different “cultures” could coexist on the same expedition. On Nanga Parbat in 1953, the leader Karl Herrligkoffer preferred “collaborative expeditions that didn’t reach the summit” to the “zeal of individuals,” while the climber Hermann Buhl defied orders to reach the summit alone (301–2).

Fallen Giants provides evidence that expeditionary cultures of Himalayan mountaineering were fundamentally shaped by the world wars of the twentieth century. For the British, the 1921 Mount Everest expedition “revived and redeployed the spirit of August 1914,” and the mountain in the 1920s became a “point of redemption for a sacrificed generation” (84, 86). This is a novel claim, one reinforced by comparisons of British and German climbers in the 1930s that also emphasize the heritage the Great War (112, 127, 132, 134). The Second World War also shaped the expeditions of the 1950s and early 1960s. Buhl remarked that Nanga Parbat was a “pitiless domain demanding its holocaust,” imagery that, the authors note, referred to the experience of combat in both wars (300, 498 n. 19). In 1963, the American flag on Everest reminded Lute Jerstad of the flag raising on Iwo Jima, and for Willi Unsoeld mountaineering was the closest thing to the “brotherhood of the battlefield” (371, 398). Chris Bonington recalled climbers of 1960 as “all servicemen steeped in the kind of morals of the Second World War” (392–93). The brotherhood of the rope during the “golden age” was tied to the brotherhood of the battlefield in ways that may help to explain why John Keegan included a brief discussion of mountaineering at the end of The Face of Battle (New York, 1976).

The “age of extremes” since 1971 is “confessional, confrontational, and commercial” (399). Fallen Giants presents the 1996 Everest disaster as the culmination of trends evident at least since an International Everest Expedition in 1971 abandoned a climber to die. Climbers unroped from one another literally and figuratively. The experience of women climbers on Nanda Devi and Annapurna is discussed with sympathy for the feminists rather than for their male critics. For Isserman and Weaver, Reinhold Messner is a narcissist who exemplifies the self-promotion of the “age of extremes.” However, Messner's comment that “I am my own homeland” could be read as the standpoint of a German-speaking Italian from the south Tyrol during the cold war rather than as narcissism, and his later trajectory representing the Green Party as a member of the European Parliament is not mentioned (435–36). The development of extreme sports, the trekking industry, the “seven summits,” and commercial expeditions before the 1996 disaster is discussed. In 1987, Soli Mehta summarized the change: “‘Because it's there’ I’m afraid is now replaced by ‘Screw you Jack, I’m alright’” (446).

Yet was the change this dramatic? Mountaineering has been confrontational and commercial for years. The first chapter of Fallen Giants notes that during the period from the late nineteenth century to the First World War, William Martin Conway climbed in the Himalayas to advance his career, A. F. Mummery underestimated risks and disappeared on Nanga Parbat, Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband were archetypal tourists, the Duke of the Abruzzi hired Italy's best guides to take him to K2, and Aleister Crowley quarreled with nearly everyone. Over the longer period, the expeditionary culture of the “golden age” may have been the exception rather than the rule, as the brotherhood of the battlefield was extended to the rope when the “greatest generation” went climbing. Explanations for recent transformations are complex, and it would have been interesting to hear the authors engage more explicitly with the works of Robert Putnam or Sherry Ortner mentioned briefly in the notes. Ortner provides a compelling account of Sherpas exercising their own agency to transform Himalayan mountaineering over the same period. The last words of Fallen Giants—“Gather courage, don’t be a chicken-hearted fellow,” advice that Tilman and Houston read on a sign in Nepal in 1950—provide an excellent example of the intercultural encounter of competitive masculinities, a process that continues to the present day (257, 453).

Fallen Giants is an outstanding work of storytelling and scholarship and has already received awards for outdoor writing and mountaineering history. It deserves to attract a wide audience not only of armchair mountaineers but also students and scholars seeking to understand the wider transformations of the twentieth century.