El Capitan: Historic Feats and Radical Routes
Like a younger, funnier Peter Matthiessen, Duane brought an easily worn literary and environmental seriousness to his beautiful 1996 book on surfing, Caught Inside: A Surfer!s Year on the California Coast and followed with a surprisingly entertaining novel about rock climbers, Looking for Mo. In his new book, Duane is again a knowledgeable but scrupulously unheroic participant narrator, conveying the wonder and self-torture of his subject without lapsing into glorifying clichE. El Capitan basically draws on the research that went into Duane!s climbing novel, re-creating the stirring ascents of the great 3000' granite chunk in Yosemite Valley known as El Cap, which is pictured throughout in dizzying photos. No one conquered the Cap until the late 1950s, but Duane shows the evolution since of the rock!s fabled routes"the Salathe, Pacific Ocean Wall, the Nose"and the change in emphasis from who will be first to whose ascent will be fastest or purest. Duane skillfully contrasts the spiritual fathers of modern rock climbing, from Warren Harding (whose 1958 effort wasn!t the prettiest or shortest on record but was first) to the more aesthetic-minded climbers Royal Robbins and Yvon Chuinard, up until the recent  free climb  attempts of Scott Burk. Recommended for sports and outdoor collections."Nathan Ward,  Library JournalCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.