Inside front cover information about In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge

In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge
By Peter Hillary and John E. Elder

Free Press, (368p) ISBN 0-7432-4369-2

A memoir of extraordinary depth and brutal honesty, In the Ghost Country is the story of Peter Hillary's journey into a world of sensory deprivation. A place where thoughts and memories are projected on to the blank slate of the Antarctic snows—so real that the ghosts of lost friends and loved ones walked with Hillary in the white maelstrom.

During the three-month-long expedition, Hillary and his two companions skied 900 miles across the icy wastes of Antarctica to the South Pole. Early on, the relationships in the little tent disintegrated to acrimony and distrust in scenes reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre's 'Hell is other people.'

This is the story of that journey: a chronicle of profound isolation, of great stamina and skill, of the mental and emotional toll exacted by travel in extreme environments. It is also a meditation on a lifetime spent on the edge, a memory book of more than thirty expeditions in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Arctic and the Antarctic. It tells of triumphant adventures—travelling with his father, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Neil Armstrong to the North Pole, climbing Mt Everest twice—and bitter tragedies, like the shattering K2 climb where Peter was the only one of eight climbers (including Alison Hargreaves) to survive, and the loss of his mother and sister in a plane crash in the Himalayas.

In the Ghost Country is a radical departure from the adventure genre, a literate and evocative tribute to the crafts of polar travel and mountaineering, a Shackleton-like tale of endurance, and a compelling contemplation on a life of adventure and accomplishment.