Books: What Mountains Are Good For

OF MEN AND MOUNTAINS (338 pp.)—William O. Douglas—Harper ($4).

"We had gone only a hundred yards or so when [my horse] Kendall (for a reason which will never be known) reared and whirled, his front feet pawing the steep slope ... I ended on a narrow ledge lying on my stomach, uninjured. I started to rise. I glanced up. I looked into the face of an avalanche. Kendall had slipped, and fallen, too ... rolling down over the same thirty precipitous yards I had traversed . . . Sixteen hundred pounds of solid horseflesh rolled me flat. I could hear my own...