Four years ago, a twenty-one-year-old soldier in the British Army named Bear Grylls was flying over an African desert on a routine parachute jump. He had a lot to look forward to - a long career ahead of him in the Army, a beautiful girlfriend back home. But those dreams were cut short when his parachute failed to open at eleven thousand feet.

He had cracked three vertebrae and come within a fraction of severing his spinal cord, which would have paralyzed him for life. A grueling eight months of physical therapy followed. Bear had to retrain his muscles to do all of the things we take for granted - how to sit, stand, walk, even breathe.

Bear endured over seventy days on Everest's southeast face. Eighteen months after his accident, at the age of twenty-three, he overcame extreme weather conditions and months of limited sleep to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain.

The Kid Who Climbed Everest is a tale of courage, perseverance, and determination, and climbing the world's tallest mountain is only half of this remarkable story. Bear's quest for funding for his expedition (including an unannounced raid for sponsorship money at the mansion-home of the president of Virgin Airways, Richard Branson), his seventy days on Everest's southeast face, and a narrow brush with death after a fall into a crevasse at nineteen thousand feet make the story of the youngest Englishman to climb Everest an essential read for anyone who's ever had a dream and made it come true.