Annapurna, The First 8000 Metre Peak

A readable telling of the first summiting of an 8000m mountain - a few years before Hillary climbed Everest with Tensing. It was the days of bare-footed porters, climbers smoking cigarettes at any given opportunity and Indian Survey maps which only vaguely resemble to actual lie of the land. In fact a chapter is devoted to wandering about attempting to locate Annapurna.
There is some controversy over whether the climb eventuated the way this book is told, where Herzog does take a lot of the glory of the expedition.

Regardless of how romanticised the story told is, and despite the fact I have read quite a lot of mountain climbing books, I really don't fundamentally understand the personal drive required for climbing. To me it is absolute madness to push on regardless of common sense, knowing that if you somehow do survive, frostbite and the loss of fingers, toes or worse will render you less able to climb again in the future, let alone anything else!

One thing I found strange about the translation, as I suspect that is where it occurred, is the constant changing of units of measure. Metres, feet, millimetres, inches, miles... it is just all over the show, sometimes within the same sentence or paragraph. Obviously a French expedition, so the metric system should have been relevant. Maybe Herzog himself was too used to conversing with those peoples who were still suffering the imperial system of measure... given the year, most had not metricated by this time. There are even three hold-outs today - lets hear it for the USA, Liberia and Myanmar.