In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood triumphantly atop Washington's Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate young mountaineers. Instead, their conquest gave way to catastrophe when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse--the pitch-black, ice-walled hell that every climber's nightmares are made of. At once a heart-stopping adventure story, a...

"When Markus Cottin begins pulling out some of the family mysteries, his father tells him he will find only "a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before." His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the tale he turns up is a shameful one of race politics and union troubles of the 1950s. When he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of...