Written within months of the events it chronicles, Into Thin Air clearly evokes the majestic Everest landscape. As the journey up the mountain progresses, Krakauer puts it in context by recalling the triumphs and perils of other Everest trips throughout history. The author's own anguish over what happened on the mountain is palpable as he leads readers to ponder timeless questions.
One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest , starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley. This was a big part of why eight people died and it took me a while to work out why.
On the day your team is going to reach the summit the guide will announce a turn round time, usually 2 pm. They might be only 30 minutes away but they must turn round and start descending. How ultimately frustrating! There were several companies guiding clients to the summit on 10 May and one of them was new and very keen to get all of its clients to the summit.
So keen that they allowed some stragglers to continue to the summit up to 4pm that day. According to JK, this contributed to some clients getting swallowed up in the sudden blizzard that hit the summit in the afternoon. No one saw it coming. But there was a whole tangle of wrong decisions that day, including some made by JK himself. So, a self-inflicted confused disaster, many of the details of which are disputed. At the end of it all I was more convinced than ever that I will never, ever understand the motivations of many of my fellow human beings View all 25 comments.
Nov 30, Michelle rated it liked it Recommends it for: mountaineers, adventure lovers, crazy people. Shelves: non-fiction. This is not a review. So…These are a few things I learned from reading this book: 1. If a person decides to climb Everest, the This is not a review. If a person decides to climb Everest, they are likely to encounter dead bodies along the route up to the summit. Lobuje, which is on the way to Everest Base Camp, is a place that overflows with human excrement.
While Krakauer was there in , he wrote "Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it. Without the assistance of Sherpas, it is unlikely that climbers would be able to reach the summit at all. Besides schlepping tons of your crap, they also know the way, and they place climbing ropes and in some instances, repair ladders, so people will be able to ascend the trickier places.
The place would also be a lot dirtier without them because they are partially responsible for removing some of the trash that Everest has accumulated over the years. One camp reported having around a thousand empty canisters of supplemental oxygen as I said below in a review comment, so I might as well stick it in here, too. On this particular excursion, two climbers got stuck on the mountain during a storm. They spent the night at 28, feet without shelter or supplemental oxygen and were believed to be dead.
The guide sent to look for them the next day found them barely breathing after chipping off three inches of ice from their faces. Believing that they were beyond help, he left them there. One of the climbers, my personal hero, woke up from his coma hours later and was lucid enough to get himself back down to one of the camps.
Sure, he lost half an arm, his nose, and all of the digits on his other hand to frostbite, but he's still alive. Oh, and sure, the events that happened on Mt. Everest in were tragic, but I do think the people who climb it know what they are risking. View all 20 comments. Sep 07, Kelly and the Book Boar rated it really liked it Shelves: own-it-spent-my-food-money-on-it , memoir , read-in , non-fiction.
Advance apologies - this might get rambly. Anyway, back to my bizarre fangirl squeeing. Please note I have zero desire to ever attempt to climb Mt.
Everest or anything higher than a flight of stairs. You know what you die of on Everest? Either that or you drown on your own lung juices. Drowning in water terrifies me, drowning because I was dumb enough to attempt to climb to the height of where a jumbo jet flies is beyond my comprehension.
I can never wrap my brain around the fact that people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a vacation where there is a one in four chance of dying rather than reaching the summit. The trick is to get back down alive. With the summit visable from this vantage point, climbers are nearly impossible to turn around — leading to a greater chance of hypothermia, frostbite, not making the descent before dark, running out of oxygen, etc.
In my opinion, it should cost a million dollars per person to climb Everest. That would be enough money for clean-up and deter the wannabe super wo men from attempting the climb. Recommended to anyone who likes to experience adventure and defy death from the safety of their reading chair.
My only advice is to familiarize yourself with the specific locations which are continually talked about with respect to the Everest climb. View all 27 comments. Jan 07, Michael rated it it was amazing. Utterly harrowing and propulsive. I could not put this book down. This is another book that details people's misguided quests to conquer nature--to see nature as something to be conquered. It's also another great cold-weather read, to make you realize that, really, it's not so cold out after all.
Apr 20, Maxwell rated it really liked it Shelves: owned , non-fiction. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of non-fiction. I prefer to listen to podcasts or interviews, rather than read straight-up non-fiction about a certain topic.
And as someone who isn't particularly interested in climbing or sports in general, this wouldn't be a book that I'd normally read. But I'm so glad that I did. It definitely reads more like a memoir, since the author was present for the events of the story.
That made it a much more palatable read for me, rather than a I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of non-fiction.
That made it a much more palatable read for me, rather than a book about an event where the author does all the research but has no first-hand experience of the thing. However, after having read this I would definitely read anything else Krakauer has written or writes because he is such an amazing storyteller.
I was never bored reading this book. He blends history and personal accounts into a gripping, harrowing, horrifying, fascinating story. It's truly awful, but I couldn't put it down. I'm not sure how I particularly feel about being so interested in reading about a tragedy like this, but I also think it opened my eyes to SO many new things that there is definitely merit to the story. On top of that, I can only imagine it was a story Krakauer felt he had to tell after having lived through it.
I will definitely be recommending this book to friends and suggesting it to people who, like me, are hesitant to pick up non-fiction books that aren't memoir.
View all 4 comments. Sep 03, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: 20th-century , united-states , travel , adventure , history , literature , biography , non-fiction , memoir. Everest Disaster is a bestselling non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer.
It details Krakauer's experience in the Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm. Krakauer's expedition was led by guide Rob Hall. Other groups were trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency, Mountain Madness, was perceived as a competitor to Hall's agency, Adventure Consultants.
Sep 12, Dave Schaafsma rated it it was amazing Shelves: nature , sports , non-fiction. Which itself calls attention to the several people who have died on Everest in the past WEEK, not dissuaded by this story, obviously, which every climber knows well in multiple versions. This is the thing about risk-takers, death-defiers, mountain climbers, they must do what they must do. I love this book. I listened to it on a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans on my spring break, It's funny, because spring break for northerners is often about heading south to warmth, and all I remember about the driving part of this trip south was climbing freezing cold and oxygen-starved Mount Everest as this incredibly gripping tragedy took place there.
You know, some nights I get up for whatever reason in the night and I can't see anything, proceeding from my bed to the hallway and skirting the edge of the stairs on the way to pee or to soothe some nightmare-ridden kid, and I recall what some unfortunate climber did in a blinding snowstorm, unable to see, trying to make it back to his tent but plummeting off the edge of a cliff and down hundreds of feet--or was it thousands?
I never fall down the stairs. Not yet, not so far, anyway. I guess you may only have to do that once at my age. But I always think of this book, in horror. Beautifully told by Krakauer, though it became as these accounts sometimes will somewhat controversial in that some people disagree with how he characterized some of the more sensitive aspects of the events.
In later editions he includes other views of some of the disputed events, other interpretations, which I think is cool. But a great book stays with you and this one stays with me. And I read very few books like this, though after that I read other books by him including Into The Wild. View all 11 comments. Jan 22, Madeline rated it really liked it. This is a story that sounds too unlikely, too cinematic, to make up. In , journalist and mountain climber Jon Kraukauer was assigned to cover an Everest ascent expedition, and chronicle the experiences of people — some experienced climbers, some not - who paid a small fortune for the chance at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Kraukauer was a member of one of three American-led climbing teams that would attempt to climb to the summit of Mt. By the time the teams made their way back This is a story that sounds too unlikely, too cinematic, to make up. By the time the teams made their way back to Base Camp, eleven people had died on the mountain.
This book, among other things, seeks to rationalize the decisions and behaviors of some of the people in the group, and understand how so many died in such a senseless way. He also attempts to explain how a person decides to climb the highest mountain in the world, and why anyone would want to do this. Seriously, Everest is bullshit and it was all I could talk about for days after finishing this book. At one point, the team climbs a bunch of ladders that were tied to a rock face by a team back in the s.
And another fun fact I learned from this book is that there are two main ways to die on Everest: first, you can lose your footing and fall into a crevasse, or just slide right off a fucking cliff, and die instantly from the fall. This is the easy way to die on Everest. Aside from the very real risk of death, Kraukauer also considers the ethics of employing local Sherpa guides, and whether supplemental oxygen ultimately helps or hurts climbers.
And, on top of all of that, this book is essentially a murder investigation — Kraukauer goes over the events of the fateful day, interviews the other surviving climbers, and evaluates the decisions of the guides and what role they may have played in the tragedy.
He manages to strike a good balance of not avoiding his own responsibility in the tragedy, while also reminding readers that he and the other climbers were suffering from severe oxygen deprivation, and therefore both their decision-making abilities and their memories are not fully functional. Christopher McCandless died because he was woefully unprepared to survive in the wild, and his lack of knowledge and naivety killed him. View all 5 comments. Jan 16, Katie rated it really liked it.
What a read to start ! I enjoyed the majority of this, and I'll admit I fell down a bit of a black hole when it came to the controversy behind Krakauer's perspective. Review will be up tomorrow! View all 3 comments. Shelves: i-said , top , lets-get-real.
Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it- mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life.
But it is the way this reads, as Jon Krakauer, a client of R Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. And back down again! Clearly the account of an anguished man desperately trying to make sense of it all, by telling it all.
Not an easy task. The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail. The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. To avoid relying excessively on my own perceptions, I interviewed most of the protagonists at great length and on multiple occasions. When I left that day Into Thin Air left with me. Hands down the greatest adventure, survivor story I have ever read.
How could it not be? The author's visceral honesty in portraying his own part in this tragedy, took my breath away and lends undeniable,crediblity to this account. The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.
View all 14 comments. Nov 16, Meike rated it really liked it Shelves: usa , read. Until , one of the trail markers for mountaineers climbing the Everest on the main Northeast ridge route was "Green Boots", the corpse of a man wearing, well, green climbing boots - yes, a dead man was an Everest landmark, and people passed him by and photographed him I will certainly not provide links. Most likely, it was the body of Head Constable Tsewang Paljor of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police who was part of an expedition that happened in the background of the Mount Everest disas Until , one of the trail markers for mountaineers climbing the Everest on the main Northeast ridge route was "Green Boots", the corpse of a man wearing, well, green climbing boots - yes, a dead man was an Everest landmark, and people passed him by and photographed him I will certainly not provide links.
Most likely, it was the body of Head Constable Tsewang Paljor of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police who was part of an expedition that happened in the background of the Mount Everest disaster, which is the main topic of Krakauer's book. While the corpse is not at that specific place anymore, Mr. Paljor's body is presumably still somewhere up there, but no one can say with certainty - what is certain though is that the cynicism and sensationalism that "Green Boots'" treatment illustrates is very telling and that the impulses behind it are an underlying theme of "Into Thin Air".
Written within months of the events it chronicles, Into Thin Air clearly evokes the majestic Everest landscape. As the journey up the mountain progresses, Krakauer puts it in context by recalling the triumphs and perils of other Everest trips throughout history. The author's own anguish over what happened on the mountain is palpable as he leads readers to ponder timeless questions.
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