Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (1997)

Interesting read and amazing that people even want to do this climb! :) ( )

I recently realized I love real-life adventure tales. Memoirs of extraordinary journeys that are true tales. Into Thin Air is one such telling of a trip to climb Mt. Everest by a journalist writing about the commercialization of Himalayan adventures. Things go horribly wrong and the result is one of the worst years in history for climbers. I’ve never wanted to go to Everest (well, maybe base camp could be fun) but after reading this I feel cold just thinking about it. ( )

This book should have been titled 100 Horrible Ways to Die. I read this with the hope of understanding why someone would want to climb Everest, but I'm afraid it's not in my psyche to understand. So many wasted lives. ( )

Wow, this is one of the greatest books about mountaineering I ever read. The author manages to pack so many details about climbing and all the people into this book, but also explains everything also for people with few or no knowledge about the topic. And even if there are so many background stories and details, it's always exciting to read and don't get boring.
The only thing is, that it's sometimes hard to follow with all the different names, but a big Nameregister and some photos help a lot.
Great book, and a big recommendation for everyone interested in mountains. It's great to have a big story like this written by an author who know his job. ( )

This book is Krakauer's well received account into the 1996 everest disaster. I know quite a lot about the disaster as I have read about it quite widely but had avoided Into Thin Air thus far. I had read that Krakaeur treated climber Anatoli Boukreev unfairly in the book when I read The Climb and this put me off of reading Into Thin Air. I finally decided to give it a shot and I'm so glad I did as this book really lives up to it's reputation. Krakauer climbed a fair bit when he was younger but his career as a journalist had taken him away from his hobby. He wanted to write about the growing commercialisation of Everest expeditions and was commissioned to do so by a magazine. One thing lead to another and the magazine bought a place for him on the best expedition companiy at the time, Adventure Consultants lead by Rob Hall. By the time the expedition was over, 12 people had died including very expedition leaders and experienced climbers, Rob Hall and Scott Fisher. The book looks into Krakauer's personal experience of climbing Everest and tries to piece togther what actually happened with the benefit of speaking to others involved after the event.

Krakauer is a very good writer and that alone had earned the book 4 stars from me. Where he earns the 5th star is in the final section of the book where he reveals the negative correspondence he got following the publication of the article he wrote. He has been accused of not helping and in fact ignoring those in peril amongst other things. At this point I think most writers would have ignored this correspondence or chose to defend their position but Krakauer does neither. He presents it as what it is, a different opinion on what happened and leaves it as that for the reader to decide. Having read this book, my opinion on him with regards to the event has changed, and although I still think he is a little harsh on Boukreev I don't begrudge his opinion even if I disagree with it. ( )