Herein, you'll find no clients being towed by their guides, no tourist routes, no bottled oxygen, no climber traffic jams, and no Sherpas hauling the author's gear. This book is about the ultimate climb: the hardest route up the highest mountain. Finally, the author and his partners completed the climb for love rather than money.

In Snow in the Kingdom, Ed Webster is a photographer above all else. Like others before him (Lito Tejada-Flores, James Balog, Galen Rowell) Ed knew that publishing his photo-intensive book with a conventional publisher would not allow him to obtain either the clarity or quantity that he needed to properly tell his story So Ed spent a decade rounding up the money, hired the best editors/designers/scanners that money could buy in Colorado (subsequently going into debt), and laboriously began self publishing his own book. We should be thankful that he's been down the road of self publishing before, because this is no amateur's tome. The end result: 150 pages of color photos in five separate signatures! Not counting 582 pages of text¾and even then you can't turn the book more than four pages without being arrested by a new black and white photo! All printed sharply on a 70-pound stock that does the photographer's work justice. If this isn't enough, the author has obtained unpublished photographs of Noel Odell's from Mallory's Everest expeditions, along with a host of pictures taken by other well-known Everest climbers and photographers. If you were to buy such a beautifully laid-out book like this from a conventional photo-book publisher, say Abrams or Chronicle, you'd pay twice as much and get half the text (eg, Bradford Washburn's elegant Mount McKinley opus).

Because Snow in the Kingdom is not just breath-taking photographs of culture and history and real climbing. You will, and I would like to emphasize will, buy this book because Ed Webster gives us his heart and soul on a platter. His is a deeply personal story about loss. The loss of Lauren Husted, a woman he once loved, who died with her head in his lap after their climbing accident in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Loss of his fingers and toes to Everest. And loss of his ability to climb--a talent that sustained Ed Webster for nearly thirty years. Or to put it in one of his fondest quotes (by Elizabeth Knowlton): "To those men who are born for mountains, the struggle can never end, until their lives end¾to them it holds the very quintessence of living¾the fiery core, after the lesser parts have burned away."

This is also a story about climbing the Kangshung Face of Mount Everest in 1989. The route is menaced by hanging glacier avalanches and technical climbing difficulties (famed alpinists Alex Lowe and David Breashears returned to the Kangshung several years later and found that they could not drag up their wealthy client, who later became famous in Into Thin Air for being dragged up the tourist route) and remains the territory of only world-class alpinists. On the way, the reader is given both an in-depth tour to Ed's emotions and the climbing history of Everest, including two of Ed's earlier attempts on the mountain. Through text and pictures, you meet many of the personalities of Everest and luminaries of climbing: Reinhold Messner, Sir John Hunt, Jim Bridwell, Audrey Saukeld, Peter Athens, rock star Billy Squier (one of Ed's clients), Sir Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Roger Marshall, Tenzing Norgay (and his son), Jay Smith, Sir Edmond Hillary, Fritz Wiessner; and Ed's Kangshung teammates: Paul Teare, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables.

Of course, by the end, we learn the specific price for the 1989 Kangshung Face Team's boldness. Ed escorts his partners, more dead than alive, back down the face. No one is really unscathed, but Ed in particular will never be the same again. I'm not going to spill the denouement here, so the best I can do is encourage you to read the book and find out for yourself what happens, in the most handsomely crafted Everest book ever produced.

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:


Easily the Best  Jun 14, 2002
After plodding through dozens of climbing books, half of them unreadable, this book was a great joy. Not only is it a beautiful volume, with voluminous footnotes and a painstaking attention to detail, but I also believe that Webster is an extraordinarily adept writer. I spent the better portion of two evenings reading "Snow in the Kingdom," and wanted to read it over again once I was finished. There is something uniquely magical about Webster's photographs, his philosophy, and his optimistic nature. The chapters dealing with the climb up the Kangshung face of Everest brought to attention the almost mystical nature of the high altitude experience, sans oxygen. It is easy to believe that after a while, utterly dwarfed by creation and crippled by thin air, man begins to feel a sense of cosmic meaning and purpose on a mountain. In many ways, all of the men on the 1988 Everest Kangshung climb were winning the race against time, drudgery, and (dare I say it) mortality. Perhaps a step into the void is the only way, in this short life, any of us can feel as though victory, however briefly, is at hand. Yes, Webster paid a terrible price in his venture on the ice walls of Everest. This book, however, should be redemption enough for that suffering. It is one of the very best of its kind.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:


Incredibly Beautiful Book!  May 08, 2001 By Giniece Carter
Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. The writing is precise and perfect, the photography stunning beyond belief, and the quality of the book is excellent. To not read this book would be like missing out on some important part of life.

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