Touching My Father's Soul: In the Footsteps of Tenzing Norgay Book

In Touching My Father's Soul Jamling Tenzing Norgay--son of sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who in company with Edmund Hillary made the first ascent to the summit of Everest in 1953--recounts his own experience of climbing the mountain with the 1996 IMAX expedition, and his spiritual quest for an understanding of how Everest has dominated the lives of both his father and himself. I felt that only by following my father up the mountain, by standing where he stood, by climbing where he had climbed, could I truly learn about him. Only then would I be able to assemble all the missing parts of a father's life that a young man envisions and longs for but never formally inherits. Jamling describes how his father's fame, and resulting fortune, liberated his children from the austere and insular life of the sherpa--the author travelled and was educated, in part, abroad--but also disconnected them from the social and spiritual certainties of that way of living. Writing after his father and mother had died, Jamling attempts to understand the meaning of their lives and their motivations. This is a deeply personal book about one man's love for an absent father, and quest for a sense of shared identity, but Jamling is an equally astute commentator on the background to this intimate journey of self discovery. He examines the tensions between the Western, combative relationship with Everest, which drew the attention of the world to the mountain, and the sherpa relationship with the place they themselves know as Chomolungma. He traces the impact of the mountain "industry", the political and religious groups that tried to hijack his father's achievement, the controversy over "who was first?" and the difficulty in reconciling the Buddhism of the sherpas with the language of conquest and ambition. Touching My Father's Soul is a spiritual, reflective work that seeks to reconcile the histories of one man, his family and his people with the immutable mystery of the mountain. --Alex Hankin Read More