From Publishers Weekly
Jordan scales a small summit of her own to share a posthumous glimpse of mountaineers Wanda Rutkiewicz, Liliane Barrard, Julie Tullis, Chantal Mauduit and Alison Hargreaves, plus others who accompanied, aided and tried to thwart them as they attempted to summit K2, which lies on the Pakistan-China border. Each woman's story explores her passion for mountaineering and her own brand of controversy: flirtation, reckless motherhood, lack of practice. Jordan, who tells each woman's tale in the order that each summited K2 (between 1986 and 1995), wisely gives much attention to Rutkiewicz, a beautiful yet willful pioneer who was the first to seek "challenges... that she had been told no woman could ever achieve." Jordan takes on a mammoth task—using journal entries, letters, published biographies, and interviews with fellow climbers, family and friends to distill five divergent lives into one narrative and using her imagination to fill in the blanks—and her prose at times is flat and repetitive. Readers are left with mini-biographies that don't have the dramatic detail to sweep the imagination like the bestseller that inspired Jordan, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. For mountain-climbing enthusiasts and women's history buffs, Jordan's well-researched survey is worthwhile reading for the famous reason mountaineers climb: because it's there. Photos. FYI:Jordan wrote a 2003 National Geographic documentary on this subject. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Five women, each with seemingly preternatural abilities to climb, have reached the summit of K2. While not the highest mountain in the world, it is considered the most deadly, hence its earning the name "Savage Mountain." One-tenth as many have climbed it as Everest, but with nearly three times as many deaths per summit. These five women--Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, French climbers Lilane Barrard and Chantal Mauduit, and British climbers Julie Tullis and Alison Hargreaves--so very different from each other, were alike in their strength, ability, determination, and willingness to endure not only the pain of high altitude but also the massive prejudice of the male-dominated climbing world. None of the women climbers were alive when journalist Jordan began this project, but she makes much of her extensive research and reveals just how amazing the climbers' accomplishments are and how very fascinating each of their stories remains, even as she struggles to capture the mountain's all-but-indescribable beauty. Jordan succumbs to the temptation to overwrite, but the stories are genuinely thrilling. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Los Angeles Times
"Jordan...gives us a sense of the rapture that comes from standing on top of the world’s highest mountains."

American Alpine Club Magazine
"SAVAGE SUMMIT fills an interesting and neglected place in mountaineering literature."

Book Description

K2 is called the "Savage Mountain" and it has earned the name. Though not quite as tall as Everest, it is far more dangerous. Located at the border of China and Pakistan in the remote Karakoram range, K2 has some of the harshest climbing conditions and weather of any place in the world. At the beginning of the 2004 climbing season, ninety women had successfully summited Everest, but only five female climbers had reached the peak of K2. Today, all of those brave pioneers are dead.

In 1986 Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz became the first woman ever to reach the top of K2 and was followed to the summit that same year by French climber Liliane Barrard and British climber Julie Tullis, both of whom died on their way down the mountain. Then in 1992, the summer that Rutkiewicz perished on Kangchenjunga, French alpinist Chantal Mauduit summited K2 and survived, only to die six years later on another 8,000-meter peak. Finally, in 1995 British climber and mother Alison Hargreaves reached the top but was killed shortly after starting her descent from its perilous summit. These courageous, remarkable women can no longer tell their tales of defeating the ferocious mountain. Jennifer Jordan, a journalist and filmmaker, tells the haunting and compelling, sometimes tragic, stories of how these women lived and died on the mountains they pursued.

Mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, poets and engineers, the female pioneers of K2 were complex personalities in the controversial world of high-altitude mountaineering, and their lives and deaths are a reminder of the high price climbers often pay to follow their dreams.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For most of the modern age "woman climber" has been an oxymoron. Women were almost without exception relegated to the role of wife, widow, prostitute, royalty or slave. But sometime during the late nineteenth century, when the first woman cinched a rope around her waist and lashed her boots into bear claw-shaped steel crampons to climb up ice walls and steep snow slopes, war was declared on the status quo. Boldest of the "warriors" were the first five women who climbed K2, one of the most remote and dangerous mountains on Earth.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly