<DIV>The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Everest celebrates the spirit to mount the ultimate peak?"Because," as George Mallory famously summed up, "it is there." This new anthology encompasses the assaults on Everest from the beginnings in 1921, through Sir Edmund Hillary's achievement in 1953, to the notorious 1996 "extreme-tourism" disaster caught so memorably in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. There are the legendary climbs of Mallory, Irvine's tragic disappearance, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's 1953 first ascent, and Reinhold Messner's solo ascent?without the use of oxygen tanks?in 1980. There are also such electrifying tales by Mallory on surviving an avalanche in 1922, and Jon Krakauer on the 1996 disasters, plus more stories from "the roof of the world" by such climber-writers as Eric Shipton, Tom Hornbein, Frank Smythe, Bill Tilman, Wilfred Noyce, Walt Unsworth, and many more.</Div>