Discoveries

The Wisdom of Donkeys

Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World

Andy Merrifield

Walker & Co.: 246 pp., $19.95

"I felt long ago that the grown-up world isn't all it's cracked up to be, that I had to invent my own truths to get by." So Andy Merrifield, professor of geography, biographer of French philosophers, child of Liverpool, went looking for peace of mind. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's 1879 book "Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes," he decided to go walking.

Key to this journey was a donkey, Gribouille (a variant of "doodle" or "scribble" in French). "Time slows down amid donkeys," the author writes. "In their company things happen quietly and methodically. It's hard to forget their innocent gaze. It's a calm that instills calm. Your mind wanders, you dream, you go elsewhere, yet somehow you remain very present."

Heidegger, Schubert, Chesterton and others are companions on this journey. But Merrifield is looking for his own lost self as well: "Hitherto, I'd lived my life sort of vicariously, modeled myself on somebody else, a character in a book, a famous writer, a famous professor." Searching for silence after a life of noise, he hears rain, birds, insects, church bells, wind and owls -- some of these for the first time. "I can't help thinking," he notes at the end of his trip, "that daydreams make us, that our little life is rounded with reverie rather than sleep."

High Crimes

The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed

Michael Kodas

Hyperion: 358 pp., $24.95

CON men, murderers and base-camp prostitutes are among the cast of characters journalist Michael Kodas encountered on his 2004 trip to Mt. Everest. In "High Crimes," he also tells us of climbers who are so eager to get to the top that they step over dying comrades, faulty oxygen tanks knowingly sold to climbers -- and of course drugs ("Virtually every banned, performance-enhancing substance that has driven sponsors and fans away from . . . cycling and baseball has made its way into mountaineering"). In this lawless arena, Kodas reports numerous instances of appalling cruelty. He quotes Sir Edmund Hillary's characteristically understated response to the 2006 death of David Sharp: "It was wrong, if there was a man suffering altitude problems and huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by." One wonders if the ghost of George Mallory (who died on Everest in 1924) still haunts its ridges.