A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Dark Shadows Falling,” Jonathan Cape Publishers, London, $24.95.

In 1985, British climber Joe Simpson, on a descent with partner Simon Yates from the peak of Siula Grande in Peru, fell and injured himself badly. Yates attempted to get Simpson down by lowering him, slowly, by rope. But that also met with disaster when, in a blinding, deafening snowstorm, Yates lowered Simpson over the edge and had to cut him loose or he would have been pulled over too.

Eventually, Simpson--injured again in the second fall when cut loose by Yates--clawed his way down the mountain to base camp and lived to climb again. His book on that experience, “Touching the Void,” became a bestseller.

Now, Simpson follows up with another climbing book that, like “Touching the Void,” is an entirely different approach to the often repetitious storytelling of mountain climbing. Simpson, perhaps better suited than anybody else in the world to write along these lines, tackles the deteriorating ethics of climbing.

He begins by telling of a situation on Mount Everest in May 1992, when a team of Indian climbers ran into trouble near the top and eventually left one member lying in the snow. They presumed he was dead and descended. The next morning, a group of Dutch climbers who had been camped nearby saw the body. They were stunned to see him raise one arm and wave.

They did nothing. Rationalizing that the Indian was probably too far gone to save, they left him there.

Simpson writes about a sport that once was built around danger, challenge and pioneering spirit and was practiced only by the fittest of the fit. Now, he decries, the South Col of Everest and above is a collection of debris, fixed ropes designed to coddle beginners to the top, and corpses.

Coming from somebody with Simpson’s background, the argument that climbing mountains above 20,000 feet should be the domain of those elite few who know how and are in shape to survive carries much weight.

The book is due out this month.