Critical Acclaim for An Eye At The Top Of The World
Oct 17, 10:34 AM | An Eye At The Top Of The World
From Booklist
From the seasoned climber and outdoor journalist comes this incredible but true story of international espionage and derring-do. Four decades ago, the CIA planted a nuclear-powered spy camera at the top of a Himalayan mountain. Although it stopped functioning a long time ago, the device has never been recovered. Four pounds of plutonium, enough to kill every person on the planet, could be moving inexorably toward the Ganges River. Takeda tells two stories simultaneously: the original expedition to put the device on top of the world, and the contemporary efforts to solve the mystery of what happened to it. Part mystery, part high-flying adventure, the book is a must-read for extreme-sports aficionados and for fans of real-life spy tales.
-David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Publishers Weekly
In 1965, a CIA-recruited team of elite American and Indian mountaineers planted a sensor atop a Himalayan peak in India to eavesdrop on nuclear bomb and missile tests in western China, then unreachable by spy planes and satellites. But one sensor-powered by highly poisonous, radioactive plutonium-disappeared in an avalanche and remains lost to this day. Compelled by the mix of Cold War intrigue and his climbing jones, veteran mountaineer and writer Takeda (Climb!) organized a 2005 expedition to retrace that mission’s steps. In this audacious account, Takeda describes the miseries of his team’s grueling, near-fatal trek. An avalanche covered their camp, forcing them to dig for their lives. They retreated, then turned back again from a second summit when a storm intervened. After returning to the U.S., several members of the team underwent treatment for post-traumatic stress. Except for reviving the story, Taneka’s (sic) book adds little to the history of the CIA operation, but it contains a good deal of lively, often hair-raising writing. Some armchair adventure travelers may roll their eyes at the positively masochistic suffering the expedition endured as it struggled up icy and increasingly dangerous slopes through deteriorating weather, but aficionados of the disastrous climbing trek genre will have few complaints.
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Uncle Octo — Oct 19, 02:49 PM #
Nice Pete. Hopefully the favorable reviews will help you sell some copies. Too bad we live in an ever-increasingly cinematic world where the typographic mindset is in steady decay. A chimp at a zoo these days tends to read at a higher level than the average American, and chimps throw less pooh than we do too.
I love the line in the second review (the one where you become, as if by magic, a completely different Asian author named “Taneka”). The line reads “Some armchair adventure travelers may roll their eyes at the positively masochistic suffering the expedition endured as it struggled up icy and increasingly dangerous slopes through deteriorating weather . . . ” No #&@*(@*(@. Mountain climbing is HARD. Armchair surfing is NOT HARD. Fat, eye-rolling, armchair-sitting *^%@^@(# . . . that’s the target audience you had in mind when you wrote the book, right Pete? Eh?