Snowdon: The Story of a Welsh Mountain & The Hills of Wales by Jim Perrin
There is a pseudo-legend frequently recounted about Cwm Cau on Cader Idris, forty miles to the south: that to sleep there alone is to wake either as poet or madman, so sublime are the surroundings – Jim Perrin, Snowdon
Ever since I walked the Llanberis Trail to the summit of Mount Snowdon part of my brain has remained in northwestern Wales. The freezing summit and zero visibility wrapped the mountains in mystery. Before going I was vaguely aware of Snowdonia’s connection to the earliest British mountaineering pioneers, but not enough to speak smartly on the subject. There are a number of books on the subject, but Jim Perrin’s offered me an opportunity to dig a little deeper into Mount Snowdon’s history with Snowdon: The Story of a Welsh Mountain, which is a compact natural, mythical, and historical review of Snowdonia.
He also seeks to give credit to the unnamed flora-seekers, shepherds, and guides for knowing the crags and crevices of Snowdon before the so-called discoveries by British hikers of a certain class. The Hills of Wales is a collection of essays that Perrin has written over the decade, so it gives a more meandering look at the whole Welsh countryside. These two books are not appropriate for reading in a single sitting, but I revisit them each night when my mind absconds from daily concerns and returns to the mountains.
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis
One of the peculiar and unexpected outcomes of peace was the desire of many veterans to go anywhere but home. For those who survived, as Paul Fussel writes, travel became a source of irrational happiness, a moving celebration of the sheer joy of being alive. – Wade Davis
Relatedly, Into the Silence by Wade Davis came strongly recommended to me by Roland, a more accomplished and well-read climber. More than a story about the first attempts by Westerners to climb Mount Everest, it tells a wide-ranging story about the devastation of World War I on a generation of British climbers, on the classist Cambridge-Oxford-bred British climbing elites, and the evolution of a climbing as a pursuit of national pride and imperial symbolism. Davis delves into the lives of each of the personalities in the English climbing community, exploration of northern India and Tibet, politicians and diplomats, and others that play parts in the quest for Everest. He explores the upbringing, their relations to the mountaineering community, the strictures of their class and upbringing, and their experience/trauma of the First World War that “cleared the board,” so to speak, for this undertaking. I’m still working my way through this one, but it’s had an iron grip on my attention.
Flashpoint Trieste: The First Battle of the Cold War by Christian Jennings
By summer 1945, five sides faced each other around Trieste. Geo-political, strategic and diplomatic necessity forced all of them to communicate and negotiate with each other constantly. Anxious fingers needed to be kept off triggers. But nobody trusted the other. There were too many hidden agendas, promises made, assurances broken, vested interests and covert priorities. At the top of the Adriatic, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Yugosalvia and Russia circled each other like nervous cats. And each nations’ storm-troopers of the Cold War, their intelligence agencies were in action. – Christian Jennings
Finally, I needed a book for a commute and picked one of the more pocket-sized paperbacks on my shelf. With my recent fascination with Italy, the outbreak of the coronavirus, and my love for historical complexity Flashpoint Trieste: The First Battle of the Cold War by Christian Jennings hits a sweet spot for my intellectual taste. Plain and simple, the Cold War wasn’t always a tale of two superpowers. It began with the convulsion of the post-World War I order – which was extremely volatile, even at the death of Adolf Hitler. This is a pretty straightforward history, but it gives nuance to a corner of World War II often overlooked with the sweeping gaze of 21st Century hindsight.
~ AZ
Andrew Zapf is a co-founder of Pushing Horizons.
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