Annapurna

Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak by Maurice Herzog, translated by Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith, 223 pages

In 1950, Maurice Herzog led a French expedition into Nepal's Kali Gandaki gorge with the intention of scouting and scaling one of the two peaks over eight thousand meters high bordering the canyon.  Exploring and finding Dhaulagiri too forbidding, they chose Annapurna, the tenth highest mountain in the world, as their target.  Overcoming all obstacles, Herzog and Louis Lachenal became the first men to summit an eight-thousander - at the cost of most of their fingers and toes, which had to be amputated as the result of extreme frostbite.  Annapurna is Herzog's conversational account of the expedition, a "record... of men at grips with Nature at her most pitiless... of their sufferings, their hopes and joys."