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He considered it his duty to share that revelation with his readers.
    F OR THIS READER, growing up in Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1950s, Annapurna came as a stunning revelation. Since the age of thirteen or fourteen, I had checked out of the public library a numberof classic Himalayan expedition narratives—Paul Bauer on Nanga Parbat, Sir John Hunt on Everest, and the like—and devoured their sagas of brave men at altitude. But mountaineering books were for me a kind of escape literature, not unlike the Hardy Boys mystery novels or Albert Payson Terhune’s fables of faithful collies, such as Lad and Lassie. It never occurred to me, reading about Nanga Parbat or K2, that I might some day go on a mountaineering expedition myself.
    Annapurna hit me hard. By the time I read the book, at age sixteen, I had started hiking up some of the inimitable “talus piles” of the Colorado Rockies—shapeless lumps of scree and tundra strung along the Continental Divide, peaks such as Audubon, James, Grays, and Torreys. It took stamina to push on at 14,000 feet, and judgment to descend in the face of a July lightning storm, but I knew that what I was doing was a far cry from real mountaineering. Staring at a true precipice, such as the 2,000-foot-high east face of Longs Peak, I felt an ambivalent longing: surely it took the competence and arrogance of the gods to inch one’s way, armed with ropes and pitons, up such dark landscapes of terror.
    Annapurna ratcheted that uncertain longing into full-blown desire. When I put down the book—swallowed in one sitting, as I recall—I wanted more than anything else in the world to become a mountaineer.
    Over the decades, Herzog’s narrative has had precisely that effect on an inordinate number of adolescents of both sexes. It might seem curious that a tale fraught with near-death, with fearful trials by storm and cold, and finally with gruesome amputations of fingers and toes turned black and rotting, should encourage any reader to take up the perilous business of climbing. Yet so exalting were the ideals that Herzog lyrically sang—loyalty, teamwork, courage, and perseverance—that rational apprehension was drowned in a tide of admiration. Those Frenchmen—Herzog, Lachenal, Terray, and Rébuffat— were gods, or at least mythic heroes.
    So I became a mountaineer, and then a writer about mountaineering. In 1980, having survived thirteen Alaskan expeditions of my own, I wrote an article for the Sierra Club’s semiannual journal Ascent, called “Slouching Toward Everest,” that tried to identify the finest mountaineering expedition books yet written, giving readers a taste of each. Summing up my roster of twenty-one classics, I concluded that Annapurna was the best of them all.
    A decade and a half later, in February 1996, I met Michel Guérin for dinner in the French ski town of Morzine. A specialty publisher of mountaineering books based in Chamonix, Guérin and I had struck up an epistolary friendship based on many a mutual enthusiasm in the climbing world.
    Our long evening’s conversation took place mostly in French, for while Michel proved to be an elegant conversationalist in his native tongue, his spoken English tended to emerge in gnostic bursts of decidedly unidiomatic phraseology. Over our second Armagnac, the talk turned to Annapurna. Michel reminded me of my paramount ranking of Herzog’s book in “Slouching Toward Everest,” which he had recently read.
    I nodded and said, “Don’t you agree?”
    It took a long moment for a wry smile to form around his cigarette; then he shook his head.
    â€œWhy not?”
    I listened to the careful disquisition that spilled from Michel’s lips, first in shock, then in dismay. It is a hard thing to have one’s hero of forty years’ standing dismantled before one’s eyes.
    The essence of what Michel told me was as follows. Annapurna was