Overview: Overlooked gentleman, unforgettable tale | Guide Reviews and News

“The Moth and the Mountain” by Ed Caesar manages to incorporate factors of past year’s hit movie, “1917” with W. Somerset Maugham’s basic novel, “The Razor’s Edge,” although introducing one of history’s neglected figures to a modern audience.

Ed Caesar is an award-winning contributing journalist to journals these types of as The New Yorker and Smithsonian. The moth in the intriguing title is a de Havilland Gipsy Moth, an open-cockpit, wooden biplane, and the mountain is, of course, Mt. Everest, which was regarded as the world’s optimum peak in 1934 and had resisted all endeavours to attain its summit.

In 1932, a decorated and bodily and psychologically ruined Earth War I British veteran manufactured a unexpected and inexplicable conclusion to endeavor to fly an plane from England to Tibet and to singlehandedly scale Everest. What made the Quixotic quest even a lot more absurd was the reality that the ex-soldier, Maurice Wilson, experienced neither piloted any plane nor climbed nearly anything larger than a flight of stairs prior to embarking on his experience.

Writer Caesar has painstakingly assembled the particulars of Wilson’s lifetime from archival data, lengthy-overlooked files, individual letters and his private diary. He also found and interviewed Wilson’s only surviving blood relative.