Donnie Eichar is a critically acclaimed TV and film writer,
director, and producer, most notably of MTV’s reality travel series
The Buried Life. He has worked as an in-house producer and director
for Current TV, directed music videos, and for the last five years
worked to write, edit, and produce his first feature-length
documentary Victory Over Darkness, which documents blind athletes
competing in an Iron Man Triathalon. His experimental film Swivel
played at SXSW and has been shown on IFC. He lives in Los
Angeles.
J.C. Gabel is the editor in chief of The Chicagoan and was the
editor and publisher of the magazine Stop Smiling and Stop Smiling
Books. He writes for numerous publications including Salon, Book
Forum, The Millions, the Oxford American, the Los Angeles Times,
and others. He also edits books for Taschen, and lives in Chicago
(currently based in L.A. for the time being while working on this
project.)
""Dead Mountain" reads like a mystery, with flashback chapters that
lead up to the last known details of the ill-fated adventure.
Author Eichar is a documentary filmmaker who fell into the
50-year-old mystery. Determined to unravel the clues, he takes a
winter hike into the same mountains. His research leads him to sort
through the classic explanations?avalanche, attack by the local
Mansi people, high winds, armed men, weapons testing, and even
aliens. Punctuated with primary source documents, readers will be
riveted to the final conclusion of the true story of the Dyatlov
Pass incident."
School Library Journal
"Five Stars...The best investigation on [The Dyatlov Pass Incident]
that I have ever read."
-Mysterious Universe podcast
"The Dyatlov Pass incident is virtually unknown outside Russia, but
in that country, it's been a much-discussed mystery for decades. In
1959, nine Russian university students disappeared on a hiking
expedition in the Ural Mountains. A rescue team found their bodies
weeks later, nearly a mile from their campsite, partially clothed,
shoeless, three of them having died from injuries that indicated a
physical confrontation. What happened here? There have been a lot
of theories, ranging from misadventure to government conspiracy to
freak weather to extraterrestrials, but no one has managed to get
to the truth. Drawing on interviews with people who knew the hikers
(and with the lone survivor of the expedition, who'd had to turn
back due to illness), Russian case documents, and the hikers' own
diaries, Eichar, an American documentarian, re-creates the
ill-fated expedition and the investigation that followed. The
author's explanation of what happened on Dead Mountain is
necessarily speculative, but it has the advantage of answering most
of the long-standing questions while being intuitively plausible. A
gripping book, at least as dramatic as Krakauer's Into Thin Air
(1997). "
-Booklist
"An American documentary filmmaker drops into the well of one of
Soviet Russia's greatest mysteries. . . . A sad tale of tragedy and
investigatory enigmas from the wilds of Soviet Union."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Dead Mountain piques your curiosity from start to finish as the
details of these nine young and vibrant hikers unfold to explain
their brave fight for survival in some of the harshest conditions
imaginable. "
-Malibu Magazine
"Readers will appreciate the drama and poignancy of Eichar's solid
depiction of this truly eerie and enduring mystery."
-Library Journal
"The mystery of the bizarre deaths of elite Russian hikers in a
1959 tragedy on a deadly Ural mountain is the subject of Eichar's
extensive investigation. Eichar, a film director and producer,
tries to make sense of the puzzling tale of the dead students from
Ural Polytechnic University; he sets off to interview the hikers'
relatives, investigators, and even a lone survivor. Following the
search party's retrievals of the bodies, the questions deepen when
the victims are discovered, insufficiently dressed for the frigid
weather, shoeless, with violent injuries, including a horrible
skull fracture, a leg torn away, and a tongue ripped out. With
expert analysis of the remaining evidence, Eichar tries to answer
why the hikers, seven men and two women, would go out into the
bitter cold without warm clothing to meet certain death; curious,
too, is that the contents of the tent were intact. Possible causes
for the panic, according to Eichar and officials, are: an
avalanche; mysterious armed men; even a fatal tiff by the males
over the women. As the elements of this complicated tangle are
compiled, the final wrap-up of the mountain tragedy is
overwhelming, befitting a case defying explanation."
-Publishers Weekly
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