But, according to Caesar, this first attempt at Wilson’s life was riddled with inaccuracies. In his lifetime, the bodacious Wilson was widely covered in the press and, in 1957, English journalist Dennis Roberts published I’ll Climb Mount Everest Alone, the first book devoted to Wilson. This brief sketch of Wilson’s crackpot quest immediately struck Caesar as incredibly “cinematic.” “I used to sometimes wake up thinking about Wilson,” Caesar says.Ĭaesar’s telling of Wilson’s remarkable story, however, is not the first. At the time, Everest had never been summited and Wilson, for his part, did not know how to fly a plane and “had hardly climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs.”Ĭaesar first encountered Wilson while reading Into the Silence by Wade Davis, a book about early Everest adventurers in which Wilson earned a few paragraphs. The adventure in question was highly ambitious and somewhat delusional: Wilson planned to crash-land a plane near the base of Everest and ascend the mountaintop, alone and unaided. At the center is Maurice Wilson, “a brilliant, bull-headed, extraordinary figure” who, after fighting in World War I, “set out on the most incredible adventure to try and redeem his broken life,” Caesar tells InsideHook.

This slim, riveting book hits all the right notes for an epic tale: the trauma of World War I, messy love triangles, globetrotting adventures, and a wayward soul hellbent on conquering his inner demons. The Moth and the Mountainby Ed Caesar details the race to conquer Everest and one amateur’s mad attempt at this historic achievement. In it, a legion of climbers hooded in brightly colored puffy jackets snake up the ridge of Everest in a perilous conga line, as if ascending a Grand Central escalator at rush hour.īefore Everest was routinely summited, it was the holy grail for alpinists and a conquest that fascinated the public and British government alike.

Overcrowded and completely commercialized, the diminishment of this storied peak is succinctly captured in a photo that went viral in May of 2019. Today, Everest is a tired cliche of achievement.

The Moth and the Mountain by Ed Caesar