The last man on the mountain The death of an American adventurer on K2

Writer and filmmaker Jordan (Savage Summit) presents the story of wealthy American Dudley Wolfe's 1939 attempt to be among the first men ever to reach the summit of the dangerous peak K2. As part of an ill-fated expedition led by Fritz Wiessner, Wolfe succeeded in reaching K2's upper slopes yet tragically died stranded alone in a high camp after three Sherpas died in a desperate attempt to rescue him. Jordan uses letters, diaries, and other archival material to deftly describe Wolfe's background and personality and to examine the events that led to his demise. While Jordan's skilled storytelling brings Wolfe to vivid life, the litany of the expedition's many hardships, including constant infighting among the climbers and poor leadership from the single-minded Wiessner, makes for rather dispiriting and grim reading. Jordan also slips occasionally into an almost worshipful attitude toward Wolfe, who begins to sound nearly saintly compared with his fellow climbers. VERDICT For climbing fans and true adventure readers, who may also like Charles Houston, Robert Bates, and Jim Wickwire's K2, the Savage Mountain.-Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A dashing explorer climbs but does not descend from the world's second-tallest mountain. Mountaineer/filmmaker Jordan (Savage Summit: The Life and Death of the First Women of K2, 2005) ponders the whys.Dudley Wolfe was born into the easy life. "Like many a child of vast wealth, he lacked the need, and therefore perhaps the drive," writes the author, "to dedicate himself to learning algebra, Latin, or the history of ancient Rome." That's the padded way of saying Wolfe was a rotten student, but not without ambitions as an athlete and explorer, wedded to the notion of sailing off to distant shores. So it was that he volunteered for action as an ambulance drivertraining ground for literary greatness, la Hemingway and Cummingson the Italian frontlines in World War I, where, Jordan portentously writes, he saw "man after man, body after body, some getting hit before his eyes with their shattered legs collapsing beneath them, others blown naked of their clothes by the bomb blast, their torsos and limbs hanging from the trees above." Or did he? Disconcertingly, the author mixes the real and the potential, setting off chunks of imagined dialogue in italics. From them, we learn that every mountaineer says "hell" a lot, but the results of the invention are without much affect: "Hell, it was more like 26,000 feet since he'd started at the ocean. And here was the end of it all; a small, almost trivial ditch of snow." Shorn of these dubious flourishes, the narrative would have suffered no loss but that of a few pagesand the best of it would have fit into a long-form magazine article. Jordan is solid with her generous descriptions of her subject's good nature, though, and with her account of finding evidence of Wolfe's story some 60-plus years after the fact on the mountain he scaled but did not leave.A second-tierInto Thin Air.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.