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: “Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves”

Authors: David Rose and Ed Douglas (National Geographic Adventure Press)

Price: $25

On Aug. 13, 1995, British climber Alison Hargreaves was blown off K2 to her death by hurricane-force winds, only an hour or so after she had completed an incredible feat.

At 33, she had climbed the two tallest mountains in the world, without oxygen, in a three-month period.

The culmination of her ascent of the tallest, Everest, May 13, 1995, was the first unsupported effort--no Sherpa guides and she carried all her equipment, broke her trail and did so without oxygen--by a woman. Three months later, to the day, at 6:30 p.m., word was radioed that she had also made it to the top of perhaps the Himalayas’ most feared peak, K2, and was heading down. It was only the fifth British ascent, man or woman, of K2.

Besides Everest and K2, Hargreaves had made many climbs, especially on extremely hazardous peaks in the Alps, and by the time she’d gone to Everest and K2, she was well known in mountaineering. She went to the Himalayas in ’95 with vast technical and rock-climbing skills, and, unlike the current stream of tourists who pay guides as much as $75,000 to get them up and down the mountain and have almost no background at altitude, she belonged there.

Or did she?

That is the attraction of this quick-read, 275-page work by Rose and Douglas, climbers themselves. They have written something fairly different from the steady stream of books about people climbing and people succeeding and/or dying. Exactly one year after Hargreaves had climbed Everest, a huge storm hit the mountain and killed eight people in the incident documented so intriguingly in Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.”

“Regions of the Heart” takes the reader through a lifetime with Hargreaves, from walks in the English hills with her father, to a teenager’s obsession with being up high, to a failed business and a stormy relationship with husband Jim Ballard.

Besides her incredible skill and courage, what separates Hargreaves’ story from other climbing stories is that she went to the Himalayas as the mother of two young children, and she had climbed one of the most difficult peaks in the Alps while more than eight months pregnant.

For these things, even in death, the world climbing media skewered her. In their book, Rose and Douglas strive for balance. It is a fascinating story, generally well told.