Perilous heights

“Savage Summit” traces the careers of the only women -- two French, two British, one Polish -- who have summited K-2, the second highest and most lethal mountain in the world, and the account is, in a way, their epitaph. Each of those five women lost their lives climbing, three during their descent of K-2 after summiting.

Jordan demonstrates how these women got swept up in their highflying quests 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 up sheer slopes, pushing to the next level in life-threatening situations when others would have backed down, sometimes trumped the rules of safety and led to their premature deaths.

-- Michael Koehn