num_pages: 224
description: Ed Hillary and his son Peter span three decades of high-altitude climbing and three decades of aid development in Nepal. From 1953 to 1984 the changes have been immense. On the climbing scene the 8,000-metre peaks have been climbed by harder and harder routes, and the siege tactics of the big battalions have given way to small oxygenless alpine-style ascents, as confidence and equipment have improved beyond all bounds. While Nepal itself, the once secret country, from which Ed Hillary climbed to fame on Everest in 1953, has opened its doors to tourism and embraced the trekking boom. In two halves of this book the Hillarys tell their sometimes separate, sometimes interwoven stories, sharing with the reader their desolation at the death of Ed's wife Louise and Daughter Belinda, and their efforts to rebuild a family relationship without the linchpins; their abiding pleasure in discovering the world's most beautiful wildernesses, whether in the snow-capped ranges of New Zealand's own South Island, or camping with old Sherpa friends in a steep rhododendron-clad valley of Nepal on a remote bridge building mission; a rueful coming to terms, in Ed's case, with the limitations of growing old, on the American 1981 Everest East Face expedition; and in Peter's case the exhilaration of climbing at extreme difficulty on Lhotse in 1982, an attempt which was only beaten back by atrocious weather 700 feet from the summit. TWO GENERATIONS is a frank and engaging book, written with good humour and total honesty by a father and son who do not always see eye to eye, but share a zest for adventure which they communicate unstintingly.
language: English
title: Two generations
publisher: Hodder and Stoughton