A classic for the arm chair adventurer, outdoors enthusiast, or true adventurer.

The story has its detractors. In particular, other who end up in Krakauer's version of the story. My grumbling is that the author comes off sounding very proud of himself and finds few of his own errors. ( )

Krakauer was a member of a commercial guided expedition to Mount Everest in 1996. He was assigned to write about the commericalization of Everest, but his expedition and another were caught poorly prepared in the summit trek, and 8 perished, including the two organizers of the expeditions. The narrative was superbly fastpaced, and gripping, especially in the description of the horrible endurance required when the oxygen is low above 25000 feet. The mountain is a regular tourist trap, with used supplemental oxygen cylinders accumulating on the summit, and horrible hygenic conditions on the way up. It did nothing to encourage me to take up rock climbing, let alone high althitude climbing ( )

This is a harrowing true story of several expeditions to climb Mount Everest in 1996. Through bad luck (a massive storm hit unexpectedly) and bad judgment (among other things, preset turn around times were ignored), a number of climbers were stranded and both deaths and serious injuries ensued.

It's a well-written tale, in which Krakauer conveys both the details of the ascent process and the tremendous difficulties--not just the technical climbing aspects, although those play a part, but, more crucially, the physical and mental toll that the altitude and lack of oxygen take on the climbers. Even with a gradual process in which climbers take weeks at increasing altitudes to become acclimated, the higher altitudes make them sluggish and mentally foggy, as well as more vulnerable to a number of serious illnesses and frostbite.

I don't pretend to understand what makes people want to do dangerous, physically miserable pursuits like this, but I do get that it's an obsession for some--and a burden for their families, left alone for months to wonder if their adventurous loved one will return alive. This book will stay with me for a long time.

Into Thin Air is the story of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster as told by a reporter who was part of the expedition. Over the course of the climb down the side of Everest, twelve people lost their lives. Into Thin Air details exactly how they died to the best of Krakauer’s ability.
The book is, obviously, written in such a way that one knows from the beginning that specific people are going to die. That knowledge is what inspires the morbid fascination that kept me glued to this book for hours on end. Mountaineering, admittedly, is not something I am particularly interested in, and at times I did find it difficult to understand why on Earth anyone would want to climb up a mountain when there was obviously so much danger involved. I suppose that its thrill is similar to that of gambling, only the people climbing are betting not only money but also their lives on whether or not the mountain will kill them.
I mentioned a feeling of fascination coupled with morbidity, and this book did inspire a certain amount of anxiety, if not fear, in me, for I was reading about men- and women- who are now dead. Who staked everything on their ability to survive, on their guides’ ability to make decisions when thin air makes rational thinking all but impossible. Who gambled and lost. And their companions had to leave them behind.
One of the more frightening parts of this book is how Krakauer describes the death of each of these people in depth, whether they died of disease or froze in the snow. I did find that the descriptions that frightened me the most were those of Ngawang Topche and Yasuko Namba. Ngawang fell ill early on in the book but his death was no small matter. He had contracted HAPE, a dangerous high-altitude disease, which was made more dangerous by some pre-existing pulmonary condition. He was shuttled down the mountain and brought to the doctors as quickly as possible, but he still died after struggling for days. Yasuko made it to the top of Everest, but was trapped with the others when that fateful storm blew in. She and another member were separated from the group and lost their way trying to find the camp. When searchers found them they were both alive, both breathing, but it was evident that Yasuko had gone beyond the point where the doctors could save her. By some miracle those two had survived in the cold, and the expedition had to leave her behind anyway. If they hadn’t, there would have been more death.
Walking hand in hand with that reality is Everest, spreading its message that mountains are not things to be trifled with, no matter how skilled the climber. In the end, the mountain is the one that decides whether climbers live or die. The smallest storm on top of that mountain can kill a man easily. The truth is , as it says in the book, that getting to the top of a mountain is easy. It’s getting down that matters.
To tell the truth, just thinking about that freaks me out. To be on top of a mountain, where the air is thin enough that bottled oxygen is necessary, and there’s no promise of returning to the ground, and the wind slices through layers of cloth like a knife. I know that I’d never be able to climb up that high, no matter how euphoric the experience may be. For one thing, I’m afraid of heights, and for another I just don’t like the chances. I’m not very fond of gambling. ( )