Ed Caesar: The Moth and The Mountain
The Book Club
English - December 09, 2020 18:59 - 36 minutes - 33.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 37 ratingsBooks Arts politics culture news comedy health entrepreneur business entrepreneurship leadership interview Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain
Next Episode: Nicholas Shakespeare: remembering John Le Carre
In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book The Moth and the Mountain tells the story of a now forgotten solo assault on Everest that ended in disaster. But as Ed argues, the heroic failure can be a richer and more resonant story than any triumph -- and as he painstakingly excavated the story of Maurice Wilson, it was just such a rich and resonant story he discovered: of a character who became fixated on the mountain as a means of redeeming wartime trauma and a chequered and at times disgraceful romantic history, of getting his own back on hated authority figures, and -- just possibly -- of finding a safe space for his darkest secret of all.