SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOARDMAN TASKER AWARD FOR MOUNTAIN LITERATURE Changing the narrative of mountaineering books, Sherpa focuses on the people who live and work on the roof of the world. Amid all the foreign adventurers that throng to Nepal to scale the world's highest peaks there exists a small community of mountain people at the foothills of Himalayas. Sherpa tells their story. It's the story of endeavour and survival at the roof of the world. It dives into their culture and tells of their existence at the edge of life and death. Written by Ankit Babu Adhikari - a writer, social science researcher and musician - and Pradeep Bashyal - a journalist with the BBC based in Nepal - Sherpa traces their story pre- and post-mountaineering revolution, their evolution as climbing crusaders with previously unpublished stories from the most notable and incredible Sherpas of the last 50 years. This is the story of the Sherpas.

• Ang Tharkay was the sirdar for Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna expedition in 1950—the first 8000-meter peak to be climbed • Ang Tharkay was a key member of the 1951 reconnaissance of Everest—which led to the successful 1953 ascent Sherpas have recently been in the public eye, in part because of the 2013 Everest “brawl,” the 2014 avalanche that took the lives of thirteen climbing Sherpas, and the 2015 earthquake that devastated Nepal. These events and others have led to much public discussion about how Sherpas today are treated and viewed by their Western employers. Sherpa expands our understanding of these issues by providing historical context. The autobiography of Ang Tharkay, who was born in 1908 and became one of the most renowned Sherpas of early Himalayan exploration, has long been a collector’s item in the original French-language edition but it has never been available in English until now. In Sherpa, Tharkay describes his experiences traveling with Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman and as the sirdar (head Sherpa) on Maurice Herzog’s 1950 ascent of Annapurna. Few such Sherpa accounts have been written, and fewer still from these early Himalayan expeditions. Opening with a brief account of Tharkay’s childhood and background, Sherpa then immerses readers in expeditions on Everest, Nanga Parbat, and, of course, Annapurna. Tharkay reveals some of the politics within the Sherpa support teams: petty arguments and shared struggles that went unnoticed or at least unrecorded by those who hired them. Tharkay’s admiration of his employers is leavened with his recognition of their shortcomings, but his affection for the climbers who employed him, and theirs for him, radiates throughout the story. Sherpa includes an original foreword by Tashi Sherpa, founder of Sherpa Adventure Gear and the nephew of Ang Tharkay. He remembers how he and his young cousins worshipped “Agu” (Uncle) as a respected mountaineer and hero, a warm and safe presence for the family.

The Sherpa Snowalker is an action yarn for the ages. The story is about the detection, location, and capture of what may be the last mammal on earth that has eluded proof of its existence, the Yeti. A wealthy industrialist and his assistants assemble a team of experts that are challenged with this task. The story begins 300,000 years ago and quickly moves to present day. The characters are funny, dramatic and engaging, as they not only struggle to complete the mission, but to come to terms with a few other dilemmas they face. Does the Yeti exist? Can it be detected? Can the team provide proof and/or complete the capture? What types of obstacles must they overcome to achieve their prize?

Stanley Stevens brings new ecological and historical perspectives to his study of a subsistence society in ever-increasing contact with the outside world. The Sherpas of the Mount Everest region, famous for their mountaineering exploits, have frequently been depicted as victims of the world`s highest-altitude tourist boom. But have the Sherpas and their homeland been transformed by tourism? He is the first to analyze the complex interaction of local environmental knowledge, cultural beliefs, and socio-economic and political conditions in changing sherpas subsistence strategies, land use practices, and local resources management institutions. Claiming the High ground is must reading for all those interested peoples and concerned about the conservation of the earth`s high places.

Engaging stories covering current personalities, popular sports figures and events, mysteries, disasters, legends and mythology, and amazing facts in science and nature hold students’ interest and capture their imaginations. A controlled vocabulary averaging two readability levels below content ensures understanding and promotes confidence.

Engaging stories covering current personalities, popular sports figures and events, mysteries, disasters, legends and mythology, and amazing facts in science and nature hold students’ interest and capture their imaginations. A controlled vocabulary averaging two readability levels below content ensures understanding and promotes confidence.

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.