The biography of Charles Houston, M.D., famed for leading the heroic K2 expedition of 1953 and his pioneering research in high-altitude medicine.In Brotherhood of the rope, Bernadette McDonald traces the development of an American hero. Houston is a mountaineer whose groundbreaking medical experiments on altitude and the human body helped calibrate the nation's WWII air-assault strategy and shorten the war. This is the man personally recruited by Sergeant Shriver to lead the first Peace Corps programs in India, the friend who Bill Moyers credits with saving his life, the physician who built some of the first artificial-heart prototypes in his garage. Houston is still a leading authority in high-altitude medicine, and serves as a mentor for troubled teens.