K-2’s role as a woman killer

Inspired in part by the critical commentary on women climbers in Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air,” “Savage Summit” traces the careers of the only women -- two French, two British, one Polish -- who have summitted K-2, the second-highest and most lethal mountain in the world, and is, in a way, their epitaph. Each of those five women lost their lives climbing, three during their descent of K-2 after summitting. But what really unites them is a spirit of adventure and the elation they felt in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps far above a glass-ceilinged world.

Jordan examines the forces that fueled these women and gives us a sense of the rapture that comes from standing on top of the world’s highest mountains. But the impulse that drove them, pushing for the next level in life-threatening adventures, sometimes trumped the basic rules of safety.

-- Michael Koehn