Fallen: George Mallory, The Man, The Myth and the 1924 Everest Tragedy by Conefrey - Non Fiction - Hardback

Details. Condition: New. Format: Hardback. ISBN: 9781838959791. Publisher: Allen & Unwin. Overview. Fallen is Mick Conefrey's forensic, myth-piercing biography of George Mallory, the charismatic climber who vanished on Everest in 1924. Drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished archives, Conefrey strips away decades of legend to reveal a complicated, brilliant and flawed man. Written by an award-winning BBC documentary-maker with a string of acclaimed mountaineering histories to his name, this hardback is essential reading for anyone fascinated by exploration, tragedy and the making of a national myth.. About the Book. For a century, George Mallory has been remembered as the golden boy of British mountaineering — handsome, articulate and doomed, the man who supposedly wanted to climb Everest "because it's there". Fallen sets out to separate the man from the myth. Using diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, Mick Conefrey rebuilds Mallory's story from the ground up: his Bloomsbury connections, his socialist politics, his fraught marriage, and the mounting pressure of three gruelling Everest expeditions between 1921 and 1924. Rather than a straightforward hero's tale, the book uncovers a more troubling picture — a gifted but sometimes reckless climber whose decisions, and those of the men around him, may have contributed to the fatal outcome on the mountain's upper slopes. Conefrey, who created the landmark BBC series The Race for Everest and has spent decades filming and writing about mountaineering history, brings a documentary-maker's eye for pace and evidence to the narrative, weaving expedition drama with intimate biography. The result reads as much like an investigation as a life story, questioning long-held assumptions about what really happened high on Everest in June 1924 and why Mallory's disappearance became one of mountaineering's most enduring mysteries. It is a book for readers who want more than hagiography: a clear-eyed, de