Although I enjoyed this collection immensely, the writing wasn't Krakauer's strongest -- in fact, I'd label it his weakest effort to date when compared with Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. With the exception of the last piece, "Devil's Thumb," the book was composed entirely of clipped magazine articles. And it showed.

Complaints aside, however, the book was wonderful and showed a humanity that I haven't often found in other climbing/mountaineering/alpinist books. Reading it reminded me how much I enjoy these adventure-fluff stories -- they're my equivalent of a romance novel -- and it has been the impetus for me to get back into the non-fiction adventure genre.

In short, read Eiger Dreams; it's a quick read, and I don't think you'll be disappointed.

This is a wonderful collection of essays about mountain climbing. I greatly enjoyed Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, and Eiger Dreams is just as good. Each chapter is an essay on some facet of mountain climbing. The first chapter is about climbing the Eiger. Other chapters are about climbing Mount Blanc and K2. Another chapter is about bouldering, and another is about the experiences of a bush pilot in Alaska, transporting mountain climbers to a glacier at the base of Mount McKinley. One chapter is about ice climbing, while another describes the experience of living in a tent for days on end, while a storm makes it impossible to get out.

A small stream of dry humor runs throughout the book. You have to have a sense of humor to engage in some of these dangerous, sometimes mind-numbing activities. One chapter describes how a team of doctors spend their summers on the slopes of Mt. McKinley. They study the effects of altitude sickness, and has saved numerous lives. All on their own dime. Krakauer asked one of the doctors "why they volunteered to spend their summers toiling in such a godforsaken place."

"Well," he explained as he stood shivering in a blizzard, reeling from nausea and a blinding headache while attempting to repair a broken radio antenna. "It's sort of like having fun, only different."

While describing the heavy human toll among climbers of K2, a troubling question gets asked: "Should a civilized society continue to condone, much less celebrate, an activity in which there appears to be a growing acceptance of death as a likely outcome?" During one summer, one out of five climbers who attempted the mountain did not come back alive.

When Krakauer told Coloradans that he intended to climb the Devil's Thumb (in Alaska) solo, they thought he had been smoking too much pot--they thought it was a "monumentally bad idea". But when he told Alaskans, they hardly reacted at all. They just wondered how much money there was in climbing such a mountain.

I am not a climber, but I find that Krakauer's writing style is ridiculously engaging. He puts you, the reader, right there on the mountain and lets you know how it feels. For a collection of non-fiction essays, this book is a real page-turner. Highly recommended.

Jon Krakauer is one of my very favorite nonfiction writers. If you haven't read any of his books, then you must read either Into the Wild or Into Thin Air (don't start with this one). This book is somewhat similar to the latter, in that it deals with mountain climbing, but this is a collection of shorter pieces he published in magazines, whereas Into Thin Air tells the story of a particularly deadly season on Mount Everest. I am one of those people who cannot imagine wanting to summit Everest, who thinks that most of those serious climbers are just crazy. But Krakauer makes me feel like I can almost understand why these people risk their lives on such extreme climbs. The pieces in Eiger Dreams are set around the world--Alaska, Europe, the Himalaya--and introduce the reader to some of the interesting and slightly crazy people who climb mountains.

I've read most of what Krakaeur has written and he never disappoints. In this case, his early writing (mostly from the 80s, magazines like Outside, where he made his name and Smithsonian) focuses primarily on mountain climbing, as well as rock climbing and canyoneering. The first book I ever read of his was Into Thin Air, where his writing of real life events read almost like horror, not due to any sensationalism on his part, but due to his crisp, searingly honest portrayal of what went down there on Everest. He brings that quality and tone to his writing here, too. He writes about the exhilaration and fear associated with this original extreme sport, so people like me can thrill to it vicariously. That said, Kathmandu and Everest base camp are on my bucket list and primarily due to reading Krakauer's writing over the years.

Okay so you can tell that these were not quite short stories but adapted articles from magazines. Also the writing was more fluffy and less 4th wall breaking than his books. Still, there’s something about alpine adventures that really gets me going

As always, Krakauer captures life-long dreams, defeats, and death-defying adventures in a few short pages. No one makes me simultaneously want to summit a mountain more or less.

So I approached this book thinking - I climb, I'm obsessed with mountains and Jon Krakauer is great, this should be fun. In the end I was like WHY AREN'T ALL OF THESE STORIES MOVIES!?!?!?! Seriously - every single story in here is just really fantastic. The most satisfying collection of essays I've read in quite a while.

Honestly Krakauer is a great writer, but I shouldn’t have read into the wild and Eiger dreams back to back… Apparently, I can only handle so much of the 'white man tries to conquer nature’-genre of books when I’m also surrounded by it everyday living in Boulder

Fantastic stories of mountain climbing. armchair climber in me enjoyed this book a lot.

Very good book, great variety of stories about those who have something deep in their souls that can only be satiated by putting themselves through hell and climbing. Highly recommend.

After Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air made him writer-famous, his publisher started pushing this essay collection, originally published in 1990, for readers who couldn't get enough of Krakauer's tales of mountains and the people who (attempt to) climb them. However, a lot of those readers, like me, were probably somewhat let down by this early effort, which consists largely of pieces Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine. The articles describing various mountains and mountain towns were educational, but not exactly riveting, and the profiles of well-known climbers were not uninteresting, exactly, but left me with a distinct why-am-I-reading-this feeling. The one humor piece, about how to survive in your tent for days as a blizzard rages outside, made it clear that while Krakauer might be a funny guy in person, he is no humor writer (and I think the topics he's chosen to write his books on bear this out).

This collection only really came alive for the last two essays, which, not coincidentally, are the two most reminiscent of Into Thin Air. One was an account of the horrific 1986 summer on K2, when 13 people died--more than had died on the peak in the past 84 years combined. Reading about the nightmarish conditions the climbers faced was absolutely riveting--although I felt guilty for deriving reading pleasure from their horrendous misfortunes, and at times was so disturbed I wondered if I'd have to hide the book.

The final essay, and the only one written especially for this book, was a memoir-like rendering of the time when Krakauer, as a 23-year-old, abandoned his dead-end job and took off alone for Alaska with the brazen certainty that he was going to scale the Devil's Thumb via its most difficult route, and that doing so would change his life. This engaging, suspenseful piece made me hope that someday Krakauer will grace us with a full-length memoir of his various adventures and their (sometimes serious) fallout.

So would I recommend Eiger Dreams? Well... not really. While I'm very glad I read the final two essays, I would say that on the whole this book is probably just for climbers and Krakauer completists. Everyone else would be better off reading Into the Wild and Into Thin Air instead.

Krakauer + mountains is always a good combo. While Eiger Dreams might not be my favorite of Krakeuer's books, I still really enjoyed it. In this collection of previously pushed articles, Krakauer expounds on why men (and it’s mostly men, not women) climb big mountains at great cost - emotionally, physically and fiscally. Eiger Dreams follows some interesting personalities as they attempt to conquer the world’s most famous peaks, like K2, Denali and El Capitan - but he also expounds on the birth of ice climbing and bouldering, to the culture of mountain towns, to how one should go about picking the right expedition partner. There’s something about Krakauer’s writing that is both expansive and insightful yet so very readable, and I blazed through this audiobook in a few of days. Some of these stories I wish were full length books!

This is my fourth read by Krakauer (I’ve also read Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith) but I’m looking to round out the rest of his backlist by the end of this year!