The Mountaineers Books publishes the best in climbing literature, boasting a list of books chronicling the greatest climbing adventures ever pursued. Courage & Misfortune contains gripping accounts of expeditions that encountered violent forces of nature or tragic accidents.

This collection reminds us that adveristy is a part of every life, and that one of ourmost powerful weapons against it is courage.

Bill Griffiths lost both hands and both eyes when he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Java in 1942. This book tells the story of how he overcame these two shattering handicaps, either one of which might have qualified him to spend the rest of his life quietly in a home for the disabled. But Bill had no intention of allowing himself to become an object of pity and it was not long after his return to civilian life that he began to make it clear that, even if he had no hands and no eyes, he still had his own two feet and he certainly intended to stand on them. Inevitably life has not been without its ups and downs, and he certainly Bill could not have got where he has without the care and devotion of Alice, his wife. Their story is one of remarkable courage, told with no trace of bitterness and with a generous helping of laughter. It is a measure of the man that Bill can end his story with the words, "I've been lucky"!

Combining in-depth analysis with strikingly apt examples of the role that courage plays in the life of human beings, this major contribution to moral philosophy argues that courage is necessary to personal achievement as well as to the common good of a civic community. Bauhn insists that courage is necessary for reinforcing people's understanding of themselves as autonomous agents, which is in turn necessary for countering widespread feelings of alienation and depression. He defines courage as the ability to confront fear, but crucially distinguishes a variety of fears that give rise to different types of courage.

* Chronicles all three of Mallory's Everest expeditions * Illuminates how Mallory reconciled his ambitions on Everest with his unquestioned love for his wife and family Since the discovery in 1999 of George Mallory's body on Everest, controversy has raged over whether Mallory and Andrew Irvine could have summitted the mountain. Every detail of the climb has been dissected and Mallory's skill as a mountaineer has been hotly debated. Observing the debate, Peter and Leni Gillman felt that the essence of who Mallory was as an individual had been lost. In The Wildest Dream they offer the most comprehensive biography ever written about one of the 20th century's most intriguing personalities. Exploring Mallory's early years, the Gillmans take the reader to Cambridge and Bloomsbury where Mallory consorted with some of the most colorful literary and artistic figures of Edwardian England: Rupert Brooke, James and Lytton Strachey, Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes, and Duncan Grant, among others. The Wildest Dream moves on to examine exactly what Mallory accomplished as a climber, evaluating the quality of his routes and skills within the context of climbing in the early 1900s. At the heart of this biography, and of Mallory's life, is his wife, Ruth. The letters they exchanged during the many separations caused by World War I and three Everest expeditions reveal the depth of their commitment to each other and the unwavering support and strength Ruth offered George. The Everest expeditions are also insightfully rendered, offering perspective on criticisms levied at Mallory after the 1921 and 1922 attempts. The authors examine how Mallory, a dedicated husband and father, arrived at his fateful decision to participate in the doomed 1924 expedition and why he continued to press for a summit attempt when the odds seemed stacked against him. As Mallory once declared, a climber was what he was, and this is what climbers did; this was how they fulfilled their wildest dreams.

What is courage and why is it one of the oldest and most universally admired virtues? How is it relevant in the world today, and what contemporary forms does it take? In this insightful and crisply written book, Geoffrey Scarre examines these questions and many more. He begins by defining courage, asking how it differs from fearlessness, recklessness and fortitude, and why people are often more willing to ascribe it to others than to avow it for themselves. He also asks whether courage can serve bad ends as well as good, and whether it can sometimes promote confrontation over compromise and dialogue. On Courage explores the ideas of Aristotle, Aquinas and many later philosophers who have written about courage, as well as drawing on classic and recent examples of courage in politics and fiction, including the German anti-Nazi "White Rose Movement", the modern phenomenon of "whistle-blowing", and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.