The first man to set foot on the summit of Everest, the man who led a team of tractors to the South Pole, the man who jetboated up the Ganges from the ocean to the sky has, for the first time, gathered all the remarkable adventures of a long life into one volume.

"Sir Edmund, he's worshipped, you know, as a god among the Sherpas." --Jamling Tenzing

"He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him." --Jan Morris

That said, Hillary is not going to get a Nobel Price for this book. It is written in a rather 'choppy' style. It is hard to follow and sometimes just plain boring. However, this book gives us a chance to take a glimpse at the human side of this great explorer. We finally see details about adventures never revealed before because authors deem them unimportant but this kind of details actually allow the readers to see the adventures from a different angle.

We see Hillary as a human being and share with him his adventures and his goals. It is just extraordinary to see a man raise from a life as a simple beekeeper to become one of the most important figures of this century and not lose his human quality in the process. It is an interesting adventure story made all the better by the fact that it actually happened.