EXCERPT
The first people who tried to scale the world's tallest mountains included college graduates and illiterates, pacifists and combat veterans, a beekeeper, and a Wyoming cowboy.
Scott Ellsworth is the author of The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas, as well as The Secret Game, winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He has written about American history for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is the author of Death in a Promised Land, his groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Ann Arbor, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.