Audrey Salkeld0.0 Leni Riefenstahl will always be remembered for her brilliant film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - still rated as one of the best documentaries ever made. Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.
Sydney Wignall0.0 In 1955 Sydney Wignall led the Welsh Himalayan expedition to climb Tibet s highest mountain, Gurla Mandhata. With a rare view of Chinese military operations in Tibet, he and two of his companions were more than mountaineers; they were spies. Not long into their journey they were captured and imprisoned, thus beginning an agonizing ordeal that would draw on their last reserves of psychic strength and physical courage. This is their story.Imprisoned by the People's Liberation Army of the Republic of China, subjected to freezing, rat-infested cells and to near-tortuous interrogation, only Wignall's incredible courage, humor, and ingenuity enabled them to survive. Eventually, international pressure forced the Chinese to release the three men. Hoping that they would not get back alive, the Chinese abandoned them at the foot of one of the highest passes in the Himalayas -- a pass never before climbed in winter -- starving, exhausted, and physically broken. Their journey back is one of mountaineering's great epics.
"Spy On the Roof of the World" is a riveting and unforgettable tale.
Джо Симпсон0.0 In Storms of Silence Joe Simpson brings up to date, in the vivid anecdotal style of This Game of Ghosts, his thoughtful, funny and moving account of his maverick life as a mountaineer. But behind the rich tapestry of adventures lies a dark and brooding disquiet. He recalls the terrifying avalanche that nearly wiped out his base camp during an attempt on the unclimbed north face of Gangchempo in the Himalaya. While climbing on Cho Oyo he meets a band of Khampas, including a four-year-old boy, fleeing over the high Nangpa La pass from the brutality of Chinese oppression in Tibet. Joe's love of Himalayan life contrasts with the ruthless Chinese destruction of the Tibetan culture and people. A violent brush with a skinhead in his home town of Sheffield is mirrored in his chilling encounter with the Peruvian police. On Huascaran, Peru's highest mountain, he hears unnerving ghostly voices and learns of the earthquake which buried 18,000 people and wiped out the town of Yungay below him. It reminds him of his boyhood visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen. The book ends with the trauma of reliving, in quite unexpected circumstances, the dance with death he described so vividly in his bestselling book Touching the Void.
Andrew Greig0.0 An adventure, a poacher's handbook, a romance and a moving story of loss and renewal.
When three friends decide to revive the challenge of the legendary poacher John Macnab (to take a grouse, salmon and deer from three Royal Estates), they plan for everything - except an unstoppable young woman with a past and time on her hands. Bold, sassy, impulsive, with a taste for a good time, flirtation and strong drink, Kirsty Fowles very nearly gets the better of everyone.
