The 9th Grade: 150 Years of Free Climbing

How have we gone from fearfully inching up gritstone to audacious on-sights of 5.14d, a level of climbing recently seen as humanly impossible? This is the question at the heart of The 9th Grade, an insider’s round-the-world study of the history, culture, and personalities that propelled free climbing from the early days of the Victorian era to the recent and astonishing first free ascent of the Dawn Wall. American climbing fans shouldn’t be put off by its Euro-centric approach—getting outside the echo chamber of Yankee climbing culture will turn you onto faces you should know but might not, like Patrick Edlinger, Catherine Destivelle, and Yuji Hirayama (Sharma, Hill, and Honnold are here, too). With deep-dive anecdotes and more than 350 photographs, it’s a feast for rock-hungry eyes and soul.