As tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was already raging across the Himalayas; mountaineers from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States were all competing to be the first to climb the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest and K2. While profiling the climbers who became heroes in an obsessive worldwide quest that was cultural as well as political, Scott Ellsworth also chronicles the unlikely success story of New Zealand beekeeper Edmund Hillary and a young Sherpa runaway called Tenzing Norgay.