Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by kathywadolowski
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
5.0
I find books about climbing really fascinating and terrifying, as it's a world I'm so unfamiliar with whose danger is unfathomable to me. I struggle to understand the motivations of those who attempt to climb Everest, likely because as probably every climbing book has ever told me, you can't really know what it's like until you're up there.
This book is pretty frequently hyped and it not disappoint, and Krakauer was extremely thorough in laying out the events preceding, during, and after May 10, 1996. The thing I can't get over is that the tragedy just seems so random; being a bit behind schedule and a badly timed storm led to catastrophe, yet climbers *on the same mission* were relatively untroubled simply because they went up and descended earlier. Krakauer again hits it on the head when he says that the magnitude of death on the mountain just doesn't really register until you've lived it.
What's interesting about this narrative is that it's quite objective and factual (or at least attempts to be when possible). Krakauer was there and relays his own experience but it doesn't read like a memoir or reflection; his journalistic instincts take over and he lays out the events, not so much the feelings, and I think it's to the book's advantage. Getting the facts of the day without much emotional coloring, even dramatization if you will, makes the horror of the reality much more biting—the deaths really slap you in the face, because there's not much doom and gloomy build-up to them as you might get in a fictional story about Everest.
I was so engaged on this ride and I respect Krakauer's inclination to recognize his own faults, and I expect I'll remain grappling with the moral questions we're left to ponder at the end of the book—when is it our responsibility to risk ourselves to help others, and when leaders fail how swiftly and effectively can we be expected to pick up the pieces? Everest is basically another world to me, but the accounts from its cliffs are deeply humanizing and thought-provoking for climbers and non-climbers alike.
This book is pretty frequently hyped and it not disappoint, and Krakauer was extremely thorough in laying out the events preceding, during, and after May 10, 1996. The thing I can't get over is that the tragedy just seems so random; being a bit behind schedule and a badly timed storm led to catastrophe, yet climbers *on the same mission* were relatively untroubled simply because they went up and descended earlier. Krakauer again hits it on the head when he says that the magnitude of death on the mountain just doesn't really register until you've lived it.
What's interesting about this narrative is that it's quite objective and factual (or at least attempts to be when possible). Krakauer was there and relays his own experience but it doesn't read like a memoir or reflection; his journalistic instincts take over and he lays out the events, not so much the feelings, and I think it's to the book's advantage. Getting the facts of the day without much emotional coloring, even dramatization if you will, makes the horror of the reality much more biting—the deaths really slap you in the face, because there's not much doom and gloomy build-up to them as you might get in a fictional story about Everest.
I was so engaged on this ride and I respect Krakauer's inclination to recognize his own faults, and I expect I'll remain grappling with the moral questions we're left to ponder at the end of the book—when is it our responsibility to risk ourselves to help others, and when leaders fail how swiftly and effectively can we be expected to pick up the pieces? Everest is basically another world to me, but the accounts from its cliffs are deeply humanizing and thought-provoking for climbers and non-climbers alike.