Book Review — Tap Dancing on Mt. Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure
By: Katie Ives | Originally published in Alpinist 89.
May 1988: For days, Mimi Zieman stared into a void of whirling snow. Somewhere behind the mists, her teammates Robert Anderson, Stephen Venables, and Ed Webster were staggering down Chomolungma (Everest), after the first ascent of the remote Neverest Buttress, far from the crowds that trudged up the normal routes that year. The whiteout concealed any signal lights, and they’d brought no radios. Waiting in Advanced Base Camp, she’d prepared herself to treat any illnesses or injuries. But she had no way of knowing if they were still alive — she had only the sense of the bond that tied her to them like an invisible rope.
Here and elsewhere, Zieman’s memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest highlights intense moments that take place off stage in many earlier climbing books — exploring the edges of a genre, a mountain, a mind. As a Holocaust survivor’s daughter, Zieman maps out the geographies of loss she traveled to reach this high, stormy place, where she is reminded, ceaselessly, of the fragility of human life. As a woman, she traces her own paths to acceptance and solidarity in a largely male mountaineering world. And as a medical officer, when the climbers finally stagger out of the clouds, she demonstrates her own heroism, tending to their severe frostbite far from any hospital.
In Alpinist 27, Ed Webster wrote that the “ethos” of how you approach Chomolungma “will determine, in large part, the mountain you find.” Appearing less than two years after his death, Tap Dancing on Everest is also a poignant remembrance of shared ideals. Lyrical and compassionate, vulnerable and gritty, Zieman brings us to a realm where alpine light still illuminates hidden chasms of the spirit — and where what matters most is “the intimacy of physically caring for one another.”
About Katie Ives
A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, a recipient of the H. Adams Carter Literary Award, and former editor-in-chief of Alpinist, Katie Ives (she/they) has written for The New York Times, Outside, and Adventure Journal, as well as many other outlets. Her book Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams earned a Special Jury Mention at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 2022, and one of her Himalayan Journal articles was a finalist for the Mountaineering Article Award in 2025. Katie is committed to supporting emerging storytellers, particularly those with less access to formal writing instruction.
