Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

by Mimi Zieman M.D.

Overview

The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain and only successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first larger team, Mimi Zieman’s team would climb without using supplemental oxygen, porter support, or chance for rescue. She would accompany the climbers as the doctor—and only woman—although she was still in her third year of medical school. Full of self-doubt, Zieman grappled with whether to go but couldn’t resist the call of the mountains. On Everest, when three climbers disappeared during their summit attempt, she reached the knife edge of her limits and dug deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.

Sparkling with suspense and vulnerability, Tap Dancing on Everest is a coming-of-age story about the risks we take to become our truest selves. Zieman weaves her childhood as the daughter of immigrants raised in 1970’s New York City, her father a Holocaust survivor, with adventure and medicine, capturing the curiosity and awe of a young woman as she faces down messages to stay small and safe and ventures into the unknown.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493078431
Publisher:	Globe Pequot Publishing
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mimi Zieman, MD is the author of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely adventure about the risks we take to become our truest selves. Her play, The Post-Roe Monologues, has been performed in New York City, Atlanta, New Mexico, and Cleveland. A board-certified OB/GYN specialized in Complex Family Planning, she’s co-authored sixteen editions of Managing Contraception with over one million copies distributed. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Ms. Magazine, Newsweek, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, NBC NewsTHINK, The Forward, and other publications. She’s spoken nationally and internationally and has been interviewed by major media outlets. Ranking high on her list of favorite things are a good adventure, dancing, animals, and a rich cup of coffee. Above all she treasures her family which includes her husband, three grown children, bonus daughter, granddaughter, and rambunctious pup.

Editorial Reviews

2024-03-15
Recollections of a courageous journey.

In 1988, Zieman, then a 25-year-old medical student, signed on as the medical officer for a team of climbers aiming to ascend the challenging East Face of Mount Everest. As she recounts in a lively, gritty memoir, the project was daunting: “Our small team of six had four climbers, a photographer, and me.” Besides taking a route that had been climbed only once before—with a large team and more guides—her team “were purists, nimble, using no oxygen or Sherpa support.” Her decision to go confounded family and friends. However, as the author demonstrates, it was consistent with her other bold, if unconventional, decisions. For example, as a high school student, despite her mother’s disapproval, she took tap dancing lessons with Broadway as her goal; in college, she spent summers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory; and in 1985, she took off for Nepal, a rugged trip that ended with a bout of shigella dysentery. “I had felt confined by various boxes and expectations,” writes Zieman, including “cement apartment building, immigrant family, Jewish Orthodox community, and my own list of shoulds.” But if being a child of Holocaust survivors instilled her with “shoulds,” it also gave her the example of reinvention. “Perhaps,” she muses, “part of my birthright was to wander.” It also instilled in her an ethos of hard work, daring, and determination. Daring certainly was a requirement for the risky, arduous Everest expedition, which confronted her with physical, medical, and emotional challenges: getting to base camp, for example, which was supposed to take five days but took 22; daily avalanches; and the heart-stopping fear that three of the climbers had perished. Zieman’s brisk narrative conveys both the tension and triumph of a wild adventure.

An engaging memoir about “taking risks” as “a path to growth.

Kirkus Reviews