"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is a stunning book: it is a probing ethnography of the strange, unequal relationship between 'sahibs' and Sherpas, a suggestive social history of the contemporary leisure class, and a powerful, often painful meditation on the cult and culture of high-risk mountaineering. With a humane, ironic, steady, and compassionate gaze, Ortner looks at lives lived at the edge of an abyss."--Stephen Greenblatt
"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is an extraordinary study of the Sherpa people, opening windows into the realities of their lives and minds, a revelatory look at the whole mountaineering thing from their perspective, and an amazingly rich account of the fascinating world of the Himalayas and the Tibetan peoples. This book is a must read for any student of Tibet and the history of the interactions of Westerners and Tibetan peoples."--Robert Thurman
"Ortner has always been one of the clearest and most forceful writers among contemporary anthropologists and her wit and lucidity are once again in evidence here."--Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago
"This highly readable book demonstrates the best of what contemporary anthropology can offer scholars and the reading public alike. A fascinating account of a timely subject."--Naomi Bishop