It is hard to remember a time when Mount Everest was unknown terrain, when no one had yet reached the summit. The story of those who first attempted that feat is the subject of anthropologist WADE DAVIS’s monumental and magical history and adventure, Into the Silence. It was the early 1920s and the men were veterans of World War I. They had seen and survived unimaginable carnage and, in exhilarating defiance, turned themselves into adventuring—and sometimes tragic—heroes for a country shell-shocked by war. With words and photos, Davis will take us back to that time and that place and that mountain.