Typically non-fiction takes me months to read. I tend to get so bogged down in the details that I find myself able to only read a chapter at a time. This was not the case with Guy's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. 

I have yet to find a biographical work that doesn't show any bias. Suggestions welcome if you know of any. This book wasn't any different. Guy obvious has a fangirl thing going on with Mary. He things she's smart, beautiful, and cunning. Personally I think one of those two things may be true. To quote some of my favorite preschool teachers, Mary makes a lot of bad choices. 

While Guy makes his adoration of Mary no secret, he also makes it perfectly clear that he is not a fan of one William Cecil (later Lord Burghley). Guy seems to believe Cecil is the root of all Mary's problems. Cecil wasn't leading Mary's fan club or even getting the newsletters but let's not get nuts. Mary was a queen in her own right. If Mary was as smart and capable as Guy wants his readers to believe, shouldn't she have been able to outsmart Cecil and survive? 

I have Guy's biography of Elizabeth I on my shelf. While I wasn't planning on reading it any time soon, I may have to move it up the list. I'm interested to see what kind of picture Guy paints of the people living on the other side of Mary's fence. I would think his characterization of Cecil would remain consistent. Right?

Read 1/1/2020- 1/5/2020

Oh my gosh, what a book. It´s really good, but now I feel emotionally drained. It´s absolutely unbelievable what has happened on that mountain.

I need some hot sweet tea now. 

Reading Boukreev´s letters, in which he responds to Krakauer´s article and allegations, and the subsequent answer from Outside magazine, you cannot help but to be infuriated. These are some journalist, whose integrity just went down the drain. What a bunch of jerks.

Fischer had not swept any clients back to Camp IV during the day because he’d never made contact with any of them after Gammelgaard had parted from him early in the climb. By two-thirty, all the clients who had started the climb had made the top of the world. There were no more climbers to sweep, no place for the clients to go but down. But nobody moved off the summit until three-ten.

There were forty minutes of celebration, picture-taking, tears, congratulations, and backslapping— and forty minutes less oxygen, forty minutes less daylight.

Idiots.

All of them but two (I think) were dependent on oxygen. All of them knew they were running out. All of them knew there were delays going down.