The Summits Of Modern Man

Mountaineering has served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. A fascinating study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mt. Everest, The Summits of Modern Man reveals the significance of our encounters with the world’s most forbidding heights and how difficult it is to imagine nature in terms other than conquest and domination.

The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.

Few things suggest rugged individualism as powerfully as the solitary mountaineer testing his or her mettle in the rough country. Yet the long history of wilderness sport complicates this image. In this surprising story of the premier rock-climbing venue in the United States, Pilgrims of the Vertical offers insight into the nature of wilderness adventure. From the founding era of mountain climbing in Victorian Europe to present-day climbing gyms, Pilgrims of the Vertical shows how ever-changing alignments of nature, technology, gender, sport, and consumer culture have shaped climbers’ relations to nature and to each other. Even in Yosemite Valley, a premier site for sporting and environmental culture since the 1800s, elite athletes cannot be entirely disentangled from the many men and women seeking recreation and camaraderie. Following these climbers through time, Joseph Taylor uncovers lessons about the relationship of individuals to groups, sport to society, and nature to culture. He also shows how social and historical contexts influenced adventurers’ choices and experiences, and why some became leading environmental activists—including John Muir, David Brower, and Yvon Chouinard. In a world in which wild nature is increasingly associated with play, and virtuous play with environmental values, Pilgrims of the Vertical explains when and how these ideas developed, and why they became intimately linked to consumerism.

This title was first published in 2001. Significant transformations in the spatial organization of European cities have taken place over the past two decades. Social fragmentation, increasingly complex systems of governance, the transformation of relations to public space and the shift of work from the industrial to the communications sectors, have placed increasing importance on a city’s position in terms of the global network. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of European experts to discuss how these transformations have forced a radical reconsideration of the traditional definitions of the city. Comparing a wide range of European cities, the book highlights the diversity of urban forms and tackles the questions regarding the quality of life in new urban spaces. The result is a comprehensive and incisive examination of the capacity of urban policies to evoke real changes in the city and to regenerate the systems of urban governance.

I have had two interests in mind in writing this book: one has been to bring into focus some of the significant developments within recent years that have contributed to the new interest in worship; the other has been to formulate what seems to me to be the distinctive basis of the religious response, and to give expression to certain convictions concerning religious living which have been gradually taking form. It is my firm belief that if man is to fulfill his greater possibilities, he must be more than moral; he must become good in the profoundly aesthetic and religious sense. This greater goodness is not attainable on the purely social or practical level. It is an achievement of personal adaptation to the deeper realities environing man, requiring sensitivity and appreciation. It can be attained only through cultivation of those capacities in man which respond to beauty and truth. Consequently, to become good in the greater sense, man must take to the arts, the greatest of which is worship. This conception of worship as an art forms the fundamental theme in this book. The reader who is interested only in the philosophy of worship developed here will pass over Part One, which is chiefly a survey of present trends in liturgy and public worship, and turn directly to Parts Two and Three. - Preface.