Edmund Hillary – A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man who against expedition orders drove his tractor to the South Pole; a man honoured around the world for his pioneering climbs yet who collapsed on more than one occasion on a mountain, and a man who gave so much to Nepal yet lost his family to its mountains.The author, Michael Gill, was a close friend of Hillary's for nearly 50 years, accompanying him on many expeditions and becoming heavily involved in Hillary's aid work building schools and hospitals in the Himalaya. During the writing of this book, Gill was granted access to a large archive of private papers and photos that were deposited in the Auckland museum after Hillary's death in 2008. Building on this unpublished material, as well as his extensive personal experience, Michael Gill profiles a man whose life was shaped by both triumph and tragedy.Gill describes the...

Michael Gills widely documentary film of the Second World War as he observed it.|Michael Gill is widely regarded as being one of the finest documentary film-makers of the twentieth century. Working as a junior reporter, he experienced the Second World War at first hand when he and his family were bombed out of their Canterbury home in June 1942. In August that year Michael joined the RAF and swiftly encountered the incomprehensible pettiness and rule-bound incongruities of service life. Later commissioned into the RAF Intelligence Branch, he was attached to a tactical bomber squadron in the build-up to D-Day and flew as an observer on operations over the devastated Normandy countryside. As the war moved towards its awful conclusion, Michael journeyed to Holland and on into Germany with his unit, witnessing the final days of the war and its pathetic aftermath for ordinary Germans. This beautifully observed memoir of the Second World War is head and shoulders above the many other...