Bernbaum, Edwin: - Edwin Bernbaum is a mountaineer and scholar of comparative religion and mythology whose work focuses on the relationship between culture and nature. The first edition of Sacred Mountains of the World won the Commonwealth Club of California's gold medal for nonfiction and the Giuseppe Mazzotti Special Jury Prize in Italy for literature of mountains, exploration and ecology, as well as being shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature in the United Kingdom. His book The Way to Shambhala on Tibetan myths and legends of sacred hidden valleys was originally published by Anchor Doubleday in 1980. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.