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A review by gmg_villa
Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar
3.0
Very strange book.
The parts that are actually about the Dyatlov Pass Incident are compelling, well-written, rich of photographies taken by the hiking party and the rescuers. By the time I got to the end of their journey, I felt like I had begun to truly know these young people and I found myself crying over their tragic fate.
That said, the sections where the author talks about his "investigative" trips to Russia are BAD. Why he operates under the delusion that the reader would care about the minutiae of his own life, I do not know, but beyond that - his attitude towards Russian people is frankly appalling. He's rude, disrespectful and condescending to everyone he meets, makes subservient/drunken/irrational caricatures out of them all, and generally beheaves so annoyingly that by mid-book I was actively rooting for something unpleasant to happen to him.
If all the parts where the author talks about himself and what he's planning on having for dinner (and how he uses Valium, and what he thinks about the climate in Southern California, and how he didn't actually bother to have someone translate the information his Russian contact had sent him) had been taken out of the book, my rating would be 4.5/5.
The parts that are actually about the Dyatlov Pass Incident are compelling, well-written, rich of photographies taken by the hiking party and the rescuers. By the time I got to the end of their journey, I felt like I had begun to truly know these young people and I found myself crying over their tragic fate.
That said, the sections where the author talks about his "investigative" trips to Russia are BAD. Why he operates under the delusion that the reader would care about the minutiae of his own life, I do not know, but beyond that - his attitude towards Russian people is frankly appalling. He's rude, disrespectful and condescending to everyone he meets, makes subservient/drunken/irrational caricatures out of them all, and generally beheaves so annoyingly that by mid-book I was actively rooting for something unpleasant to happen to him.
If all the parts where the author talks about himself and what he's planning on having for dinner (and how he uses Valium, and what he thinks about the climate in Southern California, and how he didn't actually bother to have someone translate the information his Russian contact had sent him) had been taken out of the book, my rating would be 4.5/5.