Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps, by Fergus Fleming (Atlantic Monthly Press, $26). In the cover photo of Killing Dragons, several radically underdressed men sporting street clothes of the late 19th or early 20th century—brimmed hats, suit coats and trousers, no visible gloves or special footgear—are perched along a terrifying mountain crevasse, seemingly unimpressed by their predicament. The image captures the wryly amused perspective that Fleming brings to this history of man's endeavors in the Alps, ranging from the laughably naive to the viciously competitive. For centuries, people feared the heights, not for their inaccessibility, but because they were thought to harbor dragons. But after several eccentric science buffs conquered Mont Blanc in the 1780s—one engaging a large party to carry up a parasol and "a bed with 'mattresses, sheets, coverlet, and a green curtain'"—the vogue for Alpine adventures accelerated, leading gentlemen in "cricketing flannels" and "light boating attire" to fling themselves up the peaks. Unsurprisingly, they sometimes came down in pieces; 40 years after a spectacular 1820 disaster on Mont Blanc, a nearby glacier yielded up two skulls, a left foot, and a perfectly preserved forearm protruding from the wall of a crevasse, "its hand offering itself as if to be shaken." Fleming's apt eye for such inglorious details breathes life into these oft-told tales of Matterhorn-obsessed Brits. —C.F.

The Mountains of My Life, by Walter Bonatti. Translated and edited by Robert Marshall (Modern Library, $15). Bonatti speaks! In the latest installment in the Modern Library's Exploration Series, enigmatic Italian climber Walter Bonatti embraces the English written word for the first time in a quarter-century to claim his due as one of history's greatest mountaineers—and to put one of climbing's most enduring controversies to rest. From 1961 to 1996 Bonatti wrote nine climbing books in Italian. But upon reading what he felt were the butchered English versions, he refused to authorize any further translations. Only when Robert Marshall, an Australian surgeon and climber, wrote an investigative article in 1994 about the controversial 1954 first ascent of K2 did the Italian, now 70, agree to this collection of the best of his writing on the Alps, South America, and of course K2. In 1954, Bonatti was the wunderkind of Italian climbing—and on K2 the kid was a rock. While lead climbers Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli waited at Camp 9, above 26,000 feet, preparing to summit, Bonatti and a Hunza porter humped up critical oxygen tanks. But a mix-up left the two to bivouac outside the tent, and they barely survived. The others summited; their K2 triumph returned honor to postwar Italy, and Italy loved them for it. But Bonatti found himselfinexplicably shunned by his expedition mates. Compagnoni and Lacedelli mistakenly believed he had tried to bogart the gas and poach the summit. Further, they claimed, the tanks he delivered weren't even full; their oxygen, they said, ran out 600 feet below the summit, forcing the pair to suck thin air all the way to the top. Stung, Bonatti threw himself at themountains, climbing with unrivaled boldness and style: a six-day solo of the southwest pillar of Chamonix's Petit Dru; the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV. He was only exonerated 40 years later by evidence Marshall found, a summit photograph of Compagnoni and Lacedelli inhaling gas they claimed had run out two hours earlier.But Bonatti had long since renounced climbing for photojournalism, and as illustrated by Marshall's well-chosen selections here, the loss was a great one, for climbers and readers alike. Bonatti writes as he climbed—cleanly, with no clutter of adornment or melodrama. The Mountains of My Life should revive both his name and the English-speaking world's appetite for further volumes. Marshall had better get to work. —Bruce Barcott