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INTO THIN AIR

A personal account of the mt. everest disaster.

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

A brilliantly told story, and one that won't go begging when the year's literary honors are doled out.

And onto thin ice—Krakauer's ( Into the Wild , 1995) hypnotic, rattling, firsthand account of a commercial expedition up Mt. Everest that went way wrong.

In the spring of 1996, Krakauer took an assignment from Outside magazine to report on the burgeoning industry of commercially guided, high-altitude climbing. Many experienced alpinists were dismayed that the fabled 8,000-meter summits were simply "being sold to rich parvenues'' with neither climbing grace nor talent, but possessed of colossal egos. From childhood, Krakauer had wanted to climb Everest; he was an expert on rock and ice, although he had never sojourned at Himalayan altitudes. While it has become popular to consider climbing Everest a lark and the South Col approach little more than a yak route, Krakauer found the altitude a malicious force that turned his blood to sludge and his extremities to wood, that ate his brain cells. Much of the time he lived in a hypoxic stupor, despite the standard acclimatization he underwent. As he tells of his own struggles, he plaits his tale with stories of his climbing comrades, describes the often outrageous characters on other expeditions, and details the history of Everest exploration. The writing builds eerily, portentously to the summit day, fingering little glitches that were piling up, "a slow accrual, compounding imperceptibly, steadily toward critical mass,'' when a rogue storm overtook the climbers; typical by Everest standards, it was ferocious in the extreme. Time collapses as, minute-by-minute, Krakauer rivetingly and movingly chronicles what ensued, much of which is near agony to read. Unjustly, Krakauer holds himself culpable for aspects of the disaster, but this book will serve an important purpose if it gives even one person pause before tackling Everest.

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-679-45752-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SPORTS & RECREATION | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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SEEN & HEARD

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Full Time Explorer

Nepal Travel Blog

Book Review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Travel Book Reviews / January 21, 2018 by fulltimeexplorer / 2 Comments

I was about to try my hand at mountain climbing for the first time (at the very modest height of 6500m) when I stumbled across the movie Everest on Netflix. After watching it and becoming terrified, I felt I wanted to read the true story behind the 1996 disaster that took place on Mt. Everest. While the movie was based around several books written by survivors, it’s journalist Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air , which seems to be the most factual.

Jon Krakauer was on assignment as a journalist during the notorious 1996 Everest disaster. He had been hired by a magazine to write an article about the effects of commercialism on the Everest Region. The book is full of amazing facts about Nepal and Mt. Everest in general. For instance, people couldn’t visit Nepal prior to 1949, which I find fascinating. Having been to Everest Base Camp in October, I learned a lot about different expeditions, the Sherpa culture, and Nepal.

I could relate to the feelings one goes through at altitude. I’d find them hard to describe, but Into Thin Air does a great job of painting a vivid picture of the everyday struggles one has to endure while at altitude. You get to read about each member of the team’s problems including not being able to breathe or think, snow blindness, horrible coughs, etc. along with the fatigue that comes from taking a single step with limited oxygen.

“The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself”

The real story though is what happened on one fateful day when several expeditions went to summit the tallest mountain in the world, and only a few returned. There has been much speculation about the event and how it unfolded. This book looks at the incident from as many angles as possible, only missing the stories of those who didn’t survive to tell the tale.

Most of the book revolves around one company, Adventure Consultants, who became famous for getting mediocre mountain climbers to the top of the world. They paved the way for guided expeditions up Everest, and in turn received a lot of criticism. Another guided expedition team, Mountain Madness, began to compete with Adventure Consultants creating a rivalry. Both teams set out for the summit on the same day, and both found it imperative to get their clients to the top.

“Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well… Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.”

Amidst some poor decision making and a brutal storm, not everyone made it back down alive. Those who did survive were scarred mentally and physically, having had to make tough decisions on who was worth saving and who would be left behind to die. Jon Krakauer, a skilled mountain climber, made it back to camp in time. He fell asleep due to extreme exhaustion and believed his team was behind him, while 350m away several people were freezing to death, unable to locate camp.

My only complaint about this book is that it seems Jon Krakauer had received much criticism after his article was published, so he felt he had to defend his actions on the mountain that day. As an aspiring writer, it was upsetting to read through the lines and hear his struggle. Having only been to an altitude of 5800m, I can tell you that your brain does not function normally. I can’t even imagine making life or death decisions at 8000m which is commonly referred to as “the death zone.”

Overall, the book is an incredible true story of man’s motivation to accomplish the impossible, and how ego can drive us to do things that maybe we weren’t meant to. It shows a small glimpse into the world of mountain climbing and the camaraderie and competition that goes along with it. Most of all, it’s an action packed story of the lengths one will go to for survival, and what happens when humans are put in extreme conditions. It’s both heartbreaking and inspiring, and a must read for anyone coming to Nepal.

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Michelle della giovanna.

Writer at Full Time Explorer

I’m just your average New Yorker who quit her job in the fashion industry to explore the world. Come find out what it’s like to trade in five-inch heels for squat toilets.

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Into thin air, by jon krakauer, recommendations from our site.

“Jon Krakauer is a phenomenal writer. It’s about a climbing season when the ascending teams made an avalanche of mistakes. Despite a dire forecast, out of pure hubris, many climbers cast all cautions and rules about when to return aside. Some were stranded at the top of Everest. But when the will to survive set in, they pulled together to save themselves and others. It reminds me that the will to live can have a clarifying effect in many murky situations.” Read more...

The best books on National Security

Juliette Kayyem

This is the book that really got me going on Everest literature as a grownup. It’s highly readable with an ‘angle.’ Basically, there were too may inexperienced mountaineers on the mountain, in fact too many people period. There was a huge traffic jam at the Hillary Step near the summit and this, among other things, contributed to the disaster. His descriptions of climbing, getting a headache from the sun in the day, feeling slightly dehydrated and yet at the same the cold, it’s all quite evocative. Oh. And the dead bodies.

The Best Books On Climbing Mt. Everest

Other books by Jon Krakauer

Into the wild by jon krakauer, under the banner of heaven by jon krakauer, our most recommended books, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the odyssey by homer and translated by emily wilson, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding).

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Book Reviews

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer: Book Review

In 1996, Jon Krakauer attempted to climb Mt. Everest as part of a guided group for a writing assignment for Outside magazine. An experienced climber in the hands of a reputable group of guides, he didn’t really foresee any problems. Go, climb the mountain, hope conditions allowed them to reach the summit, go home, write the article. But things are rarely that easy. A storm blows up, reminding everyone that nature laughs at our best-laid plans; some questionable decisions are made; and suddenly the entire group is fighting for their lives.

I’ve decided to try reading a non-fiction book in bed at night, thinking that I won’t be quite as interested in non-fiction, and so will find it easy to put those books down and get to bed at a decent hour. This is the first book I grabbed from the library with that in mind. Ha! I don’t know if I could have picked a worse book for tame, before-bed reading!

My poor husband has had to listen to me babble on and on about people he knows nothing about as I’ve made my way through this page-turner. Even if the climb had been fairly straight-forward, I found it interesting to read about what drove these people, how they acclimated to the altitude, and how exactly one manages to climb the highest peak on Earth. I know nothing about mountain-climbing, and, while I did find all this fascinating, I have to say that I’ll be staying in my tame little Appalachians doing easy to moderate hikes. I’m not someone who likes to push myself beyond my limits, but it’s always nice to step outside your comfort zone, even if it is through the pages of a book, and see what’s going on with others who live differently than you.

There were so very many people climbing the mountain that I completely lost track of who was who. I had the head guides down, and one or two people who really stood out, but they really did start to run together. There is a list of who’s who at the beginning of the book, but, in this edition at least, it only lists names, nationalities, and which group they were on. Not much to go on there.

It amazed me how many people climb Everest at one time. My edition only had a handful of pictures, but there were literal lines to get up certain sections of the mountain. I imagined that it would be your very small group and that would be it as far as you could see. But there are the bottlenecks, and even as they’re blundering about in the storm, random people would suddenly pop up out of nowhere to ask for directions back to camp. It sounds comparatively crowded up there!

I don’t know how it is now, but Krakauer even mentions the literal tons of trash littering the slopes of Everest and some of the cleanups that were underway around that time. I understand that you don’t want extra weight on a climb like that, but, come on. Pack it out. I hope it’s been cleaned up more in the 15 years since this book was published.

I at first thought this was a book my husband would enjoy. Then I realized that there were a few too many mistakes being made. As I told my husband about the book, he just said, “I can’t read that. I don’t have patience for that kind of thing.” And he doesn’t. Being a perfectionist, he does have a hard time reading about what might appear to be stupid mistakes.

Which brings me to my last point. It’s very easy to sit in my snug little house under my comfy blanket and with a mug of tea by my side and believe that these people made some stupid mistakes. But, for me at least, Krakauer did a good job of explaining that you just can’t think straight at that altitude. I was able to keep that in mind, read it as an adventure story with tragedy at its heart, and withhold judgment. Others, like my husband, may not be able to step back and do that. So, I say, withhold judgment yourself until you’ve been in their position. People paid for mistakes with their lives, some of the survivors feel guilty, and that’s the end of that. No one else needs to throw stones.

I highly recommend this if you don’t think you’re too much of a perfectionist to be put off by it. Just don’t try to read it before bed unless you do want to be awake all night, turning pages!

Read an excerpt .

I read this for my own Dewey Decimal Challenge .

Buy Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster on

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I recently read Aron Ralston's memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. While parts of the book seemed too technical for my liking (parts where he talks about the whole adventures that he had done) but the way he explained it and that the things that driven him to do what he did truly is fascinating. Loads of things that he did are unthinkable and I thought how could something so dangerous make a person feels so alive? I don't think that normal people in his circumstances will survive what he had went through, seriously!

I've been wanting to read this one for a LONG time. It sounds so fascinating!

I often step out of my comfort zone–vicariously through books, that is! One of the best parts of reading, for me, is that ability to step into someone else's shoes and live that life for awhile, especially when they are shoes you might not wear otherwise.

Have you read "Into the Wild"? That is also great!

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May 6, 1997 Mount Everest Has Only One Kind of Luck: Bad By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Books of the Times INTO THIN AIR A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. By Jon Krakauer. Illustrated. 293 pages. Villard Books/Random House. $24.95. t was a classic and horribly tragic case of hubris. Although Mount Everest had defied human attempts to conquer it for more than a century, although one person had died for every four who made it to the top, the world's loftiest mountain had, in recent years, come to seem more accessible, even tame: in 1993, 40 climbers reached the summit on one day alone. As the journalist Jon Krakauer notes in his gripping new book ("Into Thin Air"), Rob Hall, the leader of the Adventure Consultants expedition, bragged that he could get almost any reasonably fit person to the summit. His rival Scott Fischer, head of the Mountain Madness expedition, boasted, "We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired." On May 10, 1996, both Hall and Fischer along with another Adventure Consultants guide and two clients died in a sudden blizzard that swept across the mountain. By the end of the month, a record 12 climbers had lost their lives on the mountain. Having joined Hall's group to do an Outside magazine article on the growing commercialization of Everest, Krakauer provides the reader with a harrowing account of the disaster as it unfolded hour by hour. An experienced climber himself, Krakauer gives us both a tactile appreciation of the dangerous allure of mountaineering and a compelling chronicle of the bad luck, bad judgment and doomed heroism that led to the deaths of his climbing companions. His book turns out to be every bit as absorbing and unnerving as his 1996 best seller, "Into the Wild," the story of a young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless who left civilization and died mysteriously in the Alaskan wilderness. As described by Krakauer, even the routine facts of climbing in the death zone (above 25,000 feet) sound dangerous and painful. Bone-chilling, finger-freezing cold at night and blinding, skin-burning solar radiation at noon, not to mention the perils of frostbite, hypothermia, HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema, brought on by climbing too high, too fast) and HACE (high altitude cerebral edema). In the case of Everest, the climber must also negotiate seracs, huge, tottering blocks of ice (sometimes 12 stories tall) that can topple over without warning. Sheer faces of ice must be scaled with the help of axes and ropes, while crevasses -- glacial fissures that continually open and close -- must be bridged with ladders lashed end to end. "The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I'd been on," Krakauer writes. "I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain." In response to the question the reader repeatedly wants to ask -- Why would anyone in his right mind want to try such a thing? -- Krakauer supplies a variety of answers. Because it's there, because it's a challenge, because it offers a chance for "minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage." For the earliest climbers, it was "the most coveted object in the realm of terrestrial exploration" after the conquest of the North and South Poles. For their elite followers, it was a kind of grail, a test of skill and will and courage. "Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there," Krakauer writes of "the culture of ascent." "Prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. Nobody was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware." All this began to change in 1985, Krakauer observes, when Dick Bass, a wealthy 55-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience, reached the summit of Everest with the help of a gifted young climber named David Breashears. Suddenly Everest seemed within reach of the weekend climber, at least the rich weekend climber with enough money to acquire the very best guides and the very best equipment. By 1996, the most reputable guide services were charging $65,000 to join an Everest expedition. Indeed, Krakauer quickly discovered that his fellow Everest clients were "nothing like the hard-core climbers" he had climbed with in the past. Among them were Seaborn Beck Weathers, a 49-year-old Dallas pathologist who described himself as a Walter Mitty type (he later lost an arm and the digits of his other hand, to frostbite), and Sandy Hill Pittman, a wealthy New York socialite who arrived with a satellite phone, two computers, a CD-ROM player, an espresso maker and "stacks of press clippings about herself to hand out to the other denizens of Base Camp." Neither expensive technological gear nor raw technical expertise, however, were enough to save those climbers who died in the blizzard that unexpectedly kicked up on May 10. Krakauer acknowledges that human errors were made. Intent on getting their people to the summit, the guides, already exhausted from shepherding their less competent clients, ignored the turnaround time of 2 p.m. they had set to reach safe ground by night. Both Fischer and Hall, after all, had a lot to gain by delivering on their promise of a successful ascent: publicity, renown and more clients down the line. In the end, it was the mountain itself and the random hazards of weather that determined the climbers' fate, for as Krakauer notes, "on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance." Oddly enough, none of this appears to have dampened amateur interest in scaling Everest. In recent months, The New York Times has reported, demand for the 200 available spaces in the base camp has risen sharply, thanks in part to all the talk about the casualties claimed by the Big E last year. Return to the Books Home Page

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Book Review: Into Thin Air

Mountaineer recalls Everest tragedy

Kyle Gehman

This book is available on Amazon for $9.49. It is a personal account of climbing Everest during the 1996 tragedy.

by Kyle Gehman , Assistant Editor April 19, 2016

In the #1 National Bestseller, author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer, narrates a personal account of the tragedy on Everest in 1996 with the book Into Thin Air . This informational, emotional and gripping book receives 4 out of 5 stars.

During this nonfiction book Jon Krakauer describes his experience of summiting Everest during the 1996 tragedy, the season with the most deaths ever recorded. Besides giving his account to the events that happened during the climb, Krakauer gives plenty of historical and relevant information about Everest and the people and events that led up to the year he arrived at the mountain.

Nobody suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would matter.

— Jon Krakauer

The book starts out with a tease of information that implies there will be tragedy and then transitions to giving historical information of the mountain. This helps the reader stay engaged because they are looking forward to what happens during the rest of the book. Krakauer gives a thorough history from the first attempts to climb the 29,029 foot monster to the people who live in the area and their beliefs about Everest. As the book goes on, Jon describes his lead up to climbing the mountain and the people involved. He then goes on to give readers his story about climbing Everest on that famous year.

During the book, people get to understand many unique and interesting things. Readers learn about the long history of the mountain that has the height equivalent to 12,671 McDonald’s Big Macs. Krakauer also repeatedly explores the subject of the logic and lifestyle of mountaineers and the culture that they have. It also informs just how tough climbing the mountain really is, about 240 people have died and the height of the peak is close to the cruising altitude of most planes. Finally people learn about the events that happened on the mountain that year from someone who experienced it and lived to tell it.

This book does an amazing job of giving the facts of the climb that year, providing history and using a great writing technique to keep the reader engaged. The reason it doesn’t receive full rating is because it might not be as interesting for people who dislike outdoors and climbing, but for most, this book is definitely worth reading.

• Into Thin Air

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Into Thin Air

A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

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Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster Paperback – Illustrated, Oct. 19 1999

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• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date Oct. 19 1999
• Dimensions 13.08 x 1.93 x 20.14 cm
• ISBN-10 0385494785
• ISBN-13 978-0385494786
• Lexile measure 1320L
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From the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Illustrated edition (Oct. 19 1999)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385494785
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385494786
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 kg
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.08 x 1.93 x 20.14 cm
• #1 in Mountain Climbing
• #1 in Sports Journalism
• #1 in Mountain Climbing in Outdoor Sports

About the author

Jon krakauer.

In 1999 Jon Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to the award citation, "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind."

www.instagram.com/krakauernotwriting/

http://www.jonkrakauer.com/additional-reading

https://medium.com/@jonkrakauer

www.facebook.com/jonkrakauer/

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‘into thin air’.

— Jon Krakauer

As a client on a commercially guided tour, Jon Krakauer ( Eiger Dreams ) reached the 29,028 foot summit of Mount Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996. Only a few hours later, a raging storm would strike the mountain, nearly costing Krakauer his life. By morning, five of his fellow climbers were dead.

Into Thin Air is Krakauer's account of the climb and the aftermath of the tragedy—or debacle, depending on one's point of view.

The question that torments him, above all else, is why? Why do human beings knowingly risk their lives to climb mountains?

Krakauer writes:

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument. The truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.

This is a damning account of the commercial guiding industry, particularly as concerns Everest, and of high-stakes mountaineering in general. It is striking to me how Krakauer and his editors at Outside magazine got exactly what they wanted: a firsthand look at the perils of paying $50,000-$60,000 for the right to be shepherded up Everest. The situation was ripe for catastrophe, and the perfect storm did indeed hit, taking the lives of greenhorns and expert alpinists alike.

Krakauer made a surprising number of enemies with this book. Perhaps they misunderstood Krakauer's personal struggles to cope with his experience on Everest with an attack on mountaineering in general.

Into Thin Air makes a strong case that mountaineers never climb alone; they imperil not only their own lives, but the lives of their loved ones back home, who are thus unwilling participants in these expeditions, and who will remain behind, should the worst occur, to deal with the aftermath of having one's world shattered.

This is perhaps not a sufficient reason for mountaineers to abandon their passion. But it is certainly food for thought for those of us who venture into the mountains—guided or not.

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Review of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

My best friend Amanda recommended this to me a few years back, but if you don’t put a book in my hands when you recommend it, then good luck! Fortunately I was reminded of this book while looking for excerpts of travel writing to show to my Grade 11/12 English class last week. I was in the mood for some “adventure non-fiction” as one might call Into Thin Air . The library had an ebook available to borrow, so off I went!

If you aren’t familiar with this title yet, it’s the memoir of writer and climber Jon Krakauer. He joined a paid expedition to climb Mount Everest in April/May 1996. He was going to write an article about the commercialization of Everest for Outside magazine. But the staggering tragedy that occurred overshadowed that topic. Krakauer recounts the events and, through his interviews with others on the mountain at the time, attempts to reconstruct what happened elsewhere. In so doing, as he professes in his introduction, he hopes to make some sense out of a tragedy that clearly affected him deeply. For us as readers, especially those of us who are not mountain climbers, we can only begin to guess how such an event might shake and shape someone.

Krakauer is clearly a Writer with a capital W; his prose is purple enough I could wring it out to get some dye for clothing. He indulges his vocabulary and displays a proud penchant for metaphors. I can appreciate the craft, yet I also found this distracting at times. Sometimes I just want writers to say what they mean.

Still, I definitely enjoyed the work that he puts into describing everything about the experience. There is no way I’m ever getting anywhere near Everest, yet I would never deny a fascination with it that I suspect most of us feel, at least sometimes, about remote and unknowable parts of the world. I can understand what draws people to explore, ascend, and feel like they have “conquered” such peaks. Yet as this book demonstrates, that feeling is an illusion. Everest can and will kill you, and even approaching it is a chore I would not relish.

As Krakauer described the frankly horrific conditions prior to reaching Base Camp—at one point they’re staying somewhere so crowded that the latrines are overflowing, and his lungs become raw from the smoke. And he hadn’t even started climbing the mountain! I remember thinking to myself, as I lay outside on my deck, “This is why you don’t leave the deck, Kara. Outdoors is going to kill you.” I can barely muster up the enthusiasm for a casual outdoor hike along carefully-groomed trails, let alone climbing the world’s tallest mountain.

So it’s safe to say I can’t empathize with Krakauer’s desire to summit Everest, but I sympathize with his passion and drive and the proportional regret he must feel. Into Thin Air portrays many conflicts, from the obvious ones (person versus nature, person versus person, person versus self) to less obvious ones … there is a sense of Greek tragedy to this book. Krakauer and the other climbers’ hamartia is their prideful desire to be one of the elite who have climbed this mountain, and it’s that desire that ultimately gets many others killed. I appreciate that Krakauer does not absolve himself of responsibility or even make excuses for himself. He straight up says that his actions likely contributed to Andy Harris’ death. Into Thin Air is a sharp reminder that no matter your level of skill, no matter how prepared you are, no matter your good intentions, when disaster strikes at 29,000 feet … you are just as vulnerable to bad decisions and moments of confusion or weakness as everyone else.

It’s clear, too, that not everyone on the mountain had good intentions to begin with. Krakauer’s portrayal of a South African expedition led by Ian Woodall is particularly unflattering: they pretty much flatly refuse to do anything to help any of the other expeditions, even when it’s clear that Hall’s and Fischer’s expeditions are in huge trouble. In contrast, an IMAX team led by David Breashears offered up their oxygen supplies even though it jeopardized their own summit attempt. The stunning selfishness exhibited by some, and the corresponding selflessness of others, drives some of the book’s most intense and fascinating parts.

There’s so much to recommend here: the narration and description, the intensity of the actual events, and the perhaps bleak analysis of the human spirit. Krakauer is clearly shaken from this ordeal—he confesses he shouldn’t be writing the book so close to the timing of the events. Yet he turned out something that I nearly couldn’t put down, which is high praise for a non-fiction book.

My ebook edition is the updated version with an afterword that addresses some criticisms of Into Thin Air , particularly from Anatoli Boukreev his a ghostwriter. I enjoyed this additional material and the intertextual depth it provides to the meta-conversation around the book. It’s important to challenge and hold writers accountable for the accuracy of their portrayals, of course. I’m biased because all I’ve read is Krakauer’s work and his defense thereof; that being said, the quotations he includes from Boukreev’s book do not make me inclined to think that Boukreev and his ghostwriter were striving for anything other than self-aggrandizement.

Into Thin Air is an intense and enjoyable read, albeit one that contains more than its fair share of human tragedy. You’ll be drawn into the sense of adventure but sometimes overwhelmed by the crushing helplessness of Krakauer, Hall, and the others. Even though he foreshadows most of the outcomes, including Fischer’s death, it’s so brutal to actually hear these events described as if they are happening in real time. I found myself in denial, thinking, “No, there must be a different ending here. They are going to survive.”

But this is non-fiction, and whereas fiction can give us a happy ending if that’s the writer’s desire, non-fiction cannot change this story’s ending. Krakauer is careful not to wrap up his writing in a bow and claim he learned some huge lesson or celebrate the triumphs of human ingenuity. Into Thin Air is appropriately sobre and sombre in its portrayal of climbing Mount Everest. A remarkable accomplishment? Yes. But at a very steep price? Also yes.

Lives up to the hype.

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BOOK REVIEW: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Title: Into Thin Air Author: Jon Krakauer Publication: November 12, 1998 Publisher: Anchor Genre: Non-Fiction, Travel Pages: 368

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SYNOPSIS: (From Goodreads)

When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn’t slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin his long, dangerous descent from 29,028 feet, twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly toward the top. No one had noticed that the sky had begun to fill with clouds. Six hours later and 3,000 feet lower, in 70-knot winds and blinding snow, Krakauer collapsed in his tent, freezing, hallucinating from exhaustion and hypoxia, but safe. The following morning, he learned that six of his fellow climbers hadn’t made it back to their camp and were desperately struggling for their lives. When the storm finally passed, five of them would be dead, and the sixth so horribly frostbitten that his right hand would have to be amputated.

Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of the bestseller Into the Wild. On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world. A rangy, thirty-five-year-old New Zealander, Hall had summited Everest four times between 1990 and 1995 and had led thirty-nine climbers to the top. Ascending the mountain in close proximity to Hall’s team was a guided expedition led by Scott Fischer, a forty-year-old American with legendary strength and drive who had climbed the peak without supplemental oxygen in 1994. But neither Hall nor Fischer survived the rogue storm that struck in May 1996.

Krakauer examines what it is about Everest that has compelled so many people — including himself — to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer’s eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.

I do not read a lot of non-fiction books because I enjoy the escape that fiction gives me. However, I tend to pick up non-fiction where I think the story is important and needed to be told. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is one of those books. I had seen the movie Everest and I have heard snippets of stories from people who survived the May 10, 1996, but never in full so I figured now was the time.

This book was fascinating and horrifying all in one swoop. I will start with why I enjoyed it. I enjoy reading about things I will never ever get to do. I am 100% positive I will never climb Mt. Everest. I am not an outdoorsy person and I am definitely in no shape to climb to the highest point on earth. So learning how people are able to do it and how they have to acclimatize themselves to the lessened oxygen levels was fascinating. People like Hall and Fischer would have been cool people to know and pick their brains for all the knowledge that I will likely never know. I also love learning about people who seem like every day people but turn out to be heroes in their own selves, or just really good humans. Krakauer did a good job explaining the details of their journey and ascent to the top and how that is even possible.

That brings me to the sad part of the book. I’m sad for those who lost their lives on Everest in May of 1996. Rob Hall sounded like an extraordinary human that I easily could have gotten along with. Organized, take-charge, as safe as possible and respectful to all people, making sure everyone got the respect and appreciation they deserved. You can tell how good of a human he was by Krakauers explanation of him and comments and reactions of those on the mountain that day. Not a bad word was to be said about him and many people risked their lives to attempt to help him get down that day. While I did like Hall, there were many others I did not enjoy their personalities, but I felt the same emotions for them at the end of the book. That is a lot of families that never got to say goodbye. Krakauer did a fantastic job of describing these people and making you love them or dislike them based on their personalities.

I find that the details Krakauer included gave a unique look into this tragedy that answered a lot of questions most people would never know the answers to and also a more complete picture of what happened, how people got separated, and maybe why some didn’t make it off that mountain that day. I can see how some families may have been upset about his telling, although I don’t think it was wrong. I liked the way he described his own personal feelings and how some people were able to put it behind him while he had not been able to. It makes me wonder if now, some 16 years later, if he still feels guilty or at fault for not leaving his tent or going back up to help or if he has come to peace with the fact that he’d probably be dead too had he gone.

I really enjoyed Krakauers writing style and story telling. He filled in back stories every time we got a new person introduced so we would know who they are and their expertise that allowed them to be on that mountain that day. Krakauer was detailed, truthful, but also sensitive, in my opinion, when sharing this story and I appreciate being able to read it. I will definitely be checking out some more of his books he has written about other events in history.

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'Total bull': Into Thin Air author's opinion of Everest movie

Journalist Jon Krakauer, who was on the catastrophic 1996 climb, derides his portrayal in Jake Gyllenhaal-starring film

Jon Krakauer, the journalist who survived the catastrophic 1996 expedition on Everest that resulted in multiple fatalities, and whose subsequent book Into Thin Air became a bestselling account of it, has criticised the recently released film of the disaster as “total bull”.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times , to support the release of Prophet’s Prey, a documentary about religious sect leader Warren Jeffs who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2011 for child sex abuse, Krakauer said of the Baltasar Kormákur-directed Everest: “It’s total bull … Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read Into Thin Air.”

Krakauer, himself an experienced climber and a participant in the 1996 expedition on commission from Outside magazine, appears as a character in Everest , played by Michael Kelly. Krakauer said he had had no contact with Kelly, and the article reports he was particularly annoyed by a scene in the film in which his character refuses to help in rescue attempts after a request from Anatoli Boukreev (played by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), one of the expedition guides.

Krakauer said: “I never had that conversation. Anatoli came to several tents, and not even Sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”

Kormákur responded to Krakauer’s complaint in a statement to the LA Times. “Our intention in the tent scene that Mr Krakauer mentions was to illustrate how helpless people were and why they might not have been able to go out and rescue people … They were not malicious. They were helpless … The writers and I tried to look at things from a fair point of view without choosing sides.”

Krakauer, however, does accept one of the film’s suggestions: that his presence, and potential coverage in a major magazine, may have pushed one of the expedition leaders, Rob Hall, to take more risks. “They were taking chances trying to get clients to the summit because I was there.”

Krakauer revealed that the accident affected him for years afterwards – “I was … depressed and I didn’t even know it” – and has harsh words for the current wave of “Everest tourism”: “Everest is not real climbing. It’s rich people climbing. It’s a trophy on the wall, and they’re done … When I say I wish I’d never gone, I really mean that.”

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Into Thin Air Hardcover – Import, January 1, 1997

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Villard Books
• Publication date January 1, 1997
• Dimensions 6.02 x 1.18 x 9.21 inches
• ISBN-10 0333695275
• ISBN-13 978-0333695272
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Villard Books; First Edition (January 1, 1997)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0333695275
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0333695272
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.02 x 1.18 x 9.21 inches

About the author

Jon krakauer.

In 1999 Jon Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to the award citation, "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind."

www.instagram.com/krakauernotwriting/

http://www.jonkrakauer.com/additional-reading

https://medium.com/@jonkrakauer

www.facebook.com/jonkrakauer/

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