The Bookshelf

THE BUTCHER, by John J. Sack '51. Rinehart D. Co., N. Y. $3.50. 213 pp.

Former News Editor and Radcliffe Bureau Chief The CRIMSON, John Sack refuses to take this book seriously, steadfastly muttering that "it is a startling revelation of conditions within the meat industry . . . Second only to Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle. He is selling himself short. Sack's Butcher is a mountain, a treacherous Andean mountain given to icefalls and rotten ledges of snow. He tells how a pair of students--members of a Katzenjammer Kids mountaineering expedition from Harvard and Stanford--climbed that mountain in the summer of 1950 and very nearly lost their lives in the process. It is a fast moving story and sometimes a funny one, and one of these days Sack will find somebody paying cold cash for The Butcher at the Coop and wake up to the fact that it is one hell of a good book.

As a CRIMSON editor Sack had a neat flair for high drama and low humor, too often constricted here within the inelastic form of a news story. He runs afoul of no such limitations in The Butcher. Sack's book splits roughly into halves. The first half outlines the expedition's halting progress to the base of the mountain. It is very funny. He starts from the labor pains of the expedition, when it was busy accumulating radios which refused to work and storing breakfast food--eagerly pressed into the hands of the climbers by an enterprising cereal manufacturer--in the living room of the unhappy mother of one of the expedition's members. The expedition moves through the intricacies of Peruvian Customs, through dysentary, polluted drinking water, and a platoon of shifty-eyed mule skinners, solicitously endeavoring to part Los Alpinistos from their money.

The second part talks about the climbing of the mountain itself, and it is not funny at all. Twice the two men who finally surmounted the Butcher fell off, saved only by some extraordinary skill and guts. Both were severely frostbitten, one staking his life against the tentative Peruvian transportation network in a race to get his frozen feet under medical care. Both men spent a night huddled in a crevasse far up the 21,000 foot mountain, warmed only by the heat of a candle. Sack does a jarringly vivid job of describing first the fight to climb the mountain, then the even tougher struggle to survive the climb.

And Sack does something else too. Perhaps better than any other book this reviewer has read, The Butcher explains why people climb mountains. Most books chalk up a man's desire to scramble gasping up a peak to those glorious ten seconds on top, when he wipes the ice out of his eyes and gazes out several foggy feet into the swirling clouds. Sack makes much more sense. "Mountaineers enjoy the very process of climbing . . . they like climbing in itself." "There are some men," says Sack, "who believe that the means can be its own justification."

Sack is one of these men. When you read his book, you may very well wind up agreeing with him. --PAUI W. MANDEL '51   Reprinted from the Summer Crimson, July 9, 1952