This book was horrifying, shocking, and a show of human heart, resilience and bravery. I will never understand what it was like to be up on Mount Everest on that tragic day, but I do know that each and every person who was there has their scars to show for it.
Jon Krakauer tells all in this book; from the excitement at Base Camp to horrible dangers of altitude sickness and at its core, the strength that humans have when in life-threatening situations, and the lengths that people will go to to save each other.
This is not a story I will ever forget.

One of the darkest moments in the history of Mt.Everest climbing, and writer Jon Krakauer happened to be there to document it.
Overconfidence, ego, greed and competition in addition to bad weather all came together in the worst way.
For tens of thousands of dollars any individual can ascent to the top of Everest, though you’ll be nearly dead when you get there, if you get there at all.
If you’re fortunate get to the top with all body parts intact, you’ll spend 5 minutes at the summit before starting your descent.
If you’re told to turn around 30 or 40 feet from the summit by your guide, you do so with no questions asked regardless of your ability or cost.
Thrilling, gripping, maddening and well told. If you loved “into the wild” you’ll love this one too.

In 1996, John Krakauer went along with a guided group to the top of Everest in what would turn out to be a trip resulting in terrible tragedy. One in four people who will attempt to get to the top of Everest will die before making it back down, so the fact that anyone wants to take two months out of their life to attempt this—and just hope weather and luck prevail—is mind-boggling to me.

Krakauer is a phenomenal writer whose descriptions let the reader feel we’re hiking Everest, getting light-headed from lack of oxygen and having to make life-and-death decisions while impaired from hypoxia. His use of language is breathtaking.

On this particular expedition, several elite, world-class climbers died, perhaps in part out of the competitive spirit of wanting to get their clients to the top, even though not all of them had the talent to do this, they just had the money and the desire. Their deaths sound horrific. Even one of the people who made it out alive but suffered severe frostbite was not in any way an enviable outcome—none of their stories would compel me to attempt anything close to what they did. This is an exciting action story even though many people know the gist of what happened or what could happen in a given year on Everest or any mountain higher than 8,000 meters above sea level.

In the telling of this story there are good guys and bad guys, but somehow, even though his own life was on the line based on the poor decisions of the guides and other climbers, not just from his own group but other expeditions as well, Krakauer does a commendable job of somehow maintaining his journalistic objectivity. Impressive work. Well worth the read.

This is non-fiction, a supposedly objective description of what happened on top of Everest. I felt somewhat surprised right from the start: the author apparently dedicated his book to the people who lost their lives on May 10th 1996.... but neither Bruce Herrod died that day, nor Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa (and I still wonder why he chose to dedicate a book to a man he thoroughly discredited).

I want truth in non-fiction, and this isn't the truth. This was written out of spite - and it shows.

The author's snidey comments about the people he doesn't like are unforgivable. Some of them are vilified, discredited, demonized again and again because of the author's personal dislikes and/or prejudices.

The undercurrent of hatred, envy and derision permeates the whole book. The author's snobbish attitude "I'm a real mountaineer, I have climbed solo this and that, I'm an awesome climber, I despise all those rich people who pay to be carried up Everest, that yak route" is tiresome to say the least.

I have nothing against an omniscient author, but a journalist cannot be an omniscient author. And apparently this author knows everything, even the intimate thoughts and reasons of people who cannot disprove him - because they are dead. And so he judges Mountain Madness guides, decisions, and clients quite harshly - strangely enough, because he wasn't climbing with Mountain Madness. Or maybe that's not so strange: he was a climber with Scott Fischer's rival.

I can't see his point, really. He despises the South African team, the Taiwanese team, and Scott Fischer's team - but he doesn't question his own team, not even once. And this is the strangest thing of all, because the only clients who died that day belonged to his own team.

We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow-brick-road to the summit.

-Scott Fischer, of Mountain Madness

I don't start off with that quote to be flippant or disrespectful to the dead, but to show that even an experienced guide like Fischer, whose personal and professional life was devoted to mountains and mountaineering, was capable of tragically underestimating Everest. Granted, a lot had changed since 1924, when the British climbing duo of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last seen by team members through a parting in the clouds, high on the peak, "advancing deliberately and expeditiously" towards the summit (to this day, no one knows if they were the first people to reach it, or if they died before they got there). In the mid-90s, Jon Krakauer was asked by Outside magazine to write an article from Everest Base Camp about one of those changes, specifically the commercialization of Everest; but as a lifelong climber himself, Krakauer realized that, psychologically, he wasn't going to be able to fly halfway across the world without attempting to climb the mountain. This despite the fact that he was about to turn forty-two,

...well past my climbing prime, with a graying beard, bad gums, and fifteen extra pounds around my midriff. I was married to a woman I loved fiercely- and who loved me back. Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Krakauer ends up going with an expedition of about ten other clients under the guidance of Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants, supposedly the best in the business, with Fischer's Mountain Madness group and a few others- including a South African group led by a monomaniac obsessed with getting to the summit at all costs- going along at the same time. This wasn't a thing in the 20s, of course- the opportunity to pay experienced guides up to 70K that is, not including travel and supplies, to take you up the mountain and give you a chance at reaching the summit. And it's only a chance, as the guides often have to remind their clients- this isn't exactly like a flight from New York to DC.

Having gotten semi-seriously into running during the pandemic, incidentally, I was amused at how much the alpinists that Krakauer describes in this book reminded me of the runners I know. Get these people together in the morning before a run, and the talk is almost entirely of the nature of:
 
- didja hear John McCormick broke 50 minutes for the 10k?
- McCormick? I thought he pulled his doggone hamstring.
- welp, he's better now.
- evidently...
 
The only difference with the mountaineering types is that the references are Kilimanjaro, Denali, K2, Everest.
 
- didja hear John McCormick summited K2 without supplemental oxygen?
- McCormick? I thought he fell 2,000 meters from the Hillary Step in 2017. Plummeted screaming into the doggone yawning void of Nepal.
- welp, he's better now.
- evidently...

Anyway, for a book written so soon after the events it describes, when Krakauer's emotions were clearly still raw, his sense of narrative balance, his use of pace, and the economy of his language are all very, very impressive. It's easy to see why the book became a bestseller (and was even assigned by my high school as summer reading- records indicate that I finished it on 9/9/01, two days before 9/11, but I have no memory of this; 9/11 yes, finishing Into Thin Air not at all), even forgetting for a moment the archetypal appeal of the story. Krakauer does a great job of balancing the narrative's elements: character sketches of his fellow climbers on the expedition, previous expeditions to Everest and the ghastly or mysterious fates that befell them, the effects of altitude on the body and the mind, the general feeling of what it's like to be part of a climbing milieu, both the camaraderie and the inevitable conflicts whenever human beings spend a lot of time together, and even some of the superstition surrounding the mountain- Everest, for example, doesn't like people having sex on it, which I guess is understandable. As a matter of fact, the mountain is rather old-fashioned- it's okay if you're married, but if not... (imagine, if you will, Everest making a throat-slitting motion). Then again, as is sometimes the case, maybe this superstition has a basis in wisdom. Expending extra energy and making yourself vulnerable are two things that you probably don't want to be doing at, say, three miles above sea level- you're vulnerable enough up there anyway.

Very vulnerable. As I read, I found myself disabused of any "yellow-brick-road" notions fairly quickly. Krakauer's article, for example, as I mentioned, was originally supposed to be written from "Everest Base Camp"- well Base Camp, I thought, that sounds like a nice, relaxing place, a place to drink coffee, reflect and write...and only later did I realize that it was at frigging 17,600 feet:

Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. My deep, rasping cough...worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most nights I'd wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself to eat; instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance.

Imagine- all that pleasantness before you even start the climb. I'm burying the lead, though. This is a truly harrowing tale, nearly impossible to put down, and Krakauer's account of the climb needs to be read to be believed. I was honestly reminded of one of those horror movies in which the characters find themselves in an alternate dimension, where the conventional rules of physics no longer apply, picked off one-by-one by some malevolent force. Except in this case it's simply the effects of altitude, oxygen-deprivation, and the extraordinary capriciousness of the weather at those heights.

Trying to climb Everest is madness- as Krakauer puts it, "There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act...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." Perhaps one of the most haunting anecdotes from the book is that of a Thai expedition leader who ended up badly frostbitten, and losing a member of his team- but as a couple of Sherpas carry him down the mountain, at personal risk to themselves, the man can be heard yelling, over and over, "Victory! Victory! We made summit!"- almost as if under some kind of spell.

Still, I was a little dismayed that the most-liked review here starts off using the word "idiocy." Madness I think is an appropriate word in this context, but idiocy I find less so. I got the impression from Krakauer that all kinds of people climb Everest in this day and age (usually people who are well-off, though not always- like Krakauer's friend Doug, who was a postal worker and got a second job in construction to be able to afford the trip), and sure there are some jerks, megalomaniacs and the odd New York socialite (which is not to say that any one of those three terms is mutually exclusive with the others), but Krakauer nevertheless starts to notice a "seriousness of purpose" among many of his fellow climbers. Take a fifty-six year-old anesthesiologist from Australia by the name of John Taske:

Taske had been a big deal in the army- a full-bird colonel in the Special Air Service, Australia's equivalent of the Green Berets. Having served two tours in Vietnam at the height of the war, he found himself woefully unprepared for the flat pitch of life out of uniform. "I discovered that I couldn't really speak to civilians", he continued. "My marriage fell apart. All I could see was this long dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age, and death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what had been missing for me in civvy street- the challenge, the camaraderie, the sense of mission."

That's not idiocy- at least not to me.

8/10

I enjoyed this, well as much as you can enjoy people dying on a hillside. But what an interesting listen this was, from the start offering a history of those trying to conquer the tiny Himalayan hill to the ill fated season of '96 that saw a number of climbers, both clients and guides, perish in the then worst season in terms of deaths.

I couldn't imagine trying to do what these guys do. It's epic. To go through the intense acclimatisation period alone sounds ridiculous but then to try and reach the summit going through the death zone where your body is literally dying whilst you prance around at the same altitude as a Boeing 747 and hope for a spot of luck in terms of weather so that you don't die and be left there as a grim warning to others foolish enough to try to get to the top. These folks are crazy but I also admire their determination to be on top of the world and go through all this.

The story is laid out here really well, giving you bits of information along the way on the history of the climbers and their reasons for being there. It lays out all the trials and tribulations they have trying to get to the top and other issues throughout the season. Everything is interesting and even though you know the outcome it's still exciting.

The audiobook is well narrated without ever hitting the realms of immense but the material itself means that not much needs to be added to add intrigue here. The narrator does some accents and the results vary.

I enjoyed this so much that I'm actually interested in reading/listening to other similar style books and also more by the author. There is another book telling of the same incident but from another perspective and I'm keen to give that a try. I'd recommend this to anyone with a slight interest in climbing but it offers so much more

I read "Climb" first by Boukreev as suggested by my friends in the climbing community, then read this book. If you read both, there won't be a question in your mind about what actually happened that day. Krakauer is a better author, but in this case, not a better climber nor a reliable witness.

Цю книгу треба було назвати 100 і одна причина, чому вам не треба на Еверест

“Wisdom comes easily after the fact.”

I have read a few Jon Krakauer books over the years, and although I enjoyed INTO THIN AIR, it is my least favorite of his thus far. I think mainly because this text is too much of him, he was a firsthand participant in the events the book depicts, and I did not find him all that likable, and thus it got in my way.

This text is about the disastrous spring in 1996 when Mount Everest claimed many lives from the various expeditions (almost all of them commercial) that were attempting to summit her that year. Mr. Krakauer was on one of them, and he was in the midst of the deadly few days that claimed the lives of 6 or so people. It was undoubtedly a traumatic experience, and Krakauer succeeds in conveying that.

INTO THIN AIR was a fine read, It is well written and organized, but I was not all that into it until the last 100 pages or so. It is not quite a 3oo page book, so that is not as big a deal as it sounds.

Krakauer admits in the book’s opening that he was discouraged from writing about the events on Everest in May of 1996 until he had put some distance and assessment between himself and this very monumental personal event in his life. He waited less than a year. I wish he had taken that advice. Some time, distance, and perspective would have made this text a better read.

My biggest issue with the text was the obvious way Krakauer tries to appear modest and humble, as it does not quite fit and appears insincere, even though he goes to great lengths to try to achieve the opposite effect. His double guessing some folks who were clearly heroes of those days, in particular a man named Anatoli Boukreev, who actually saved lives, was a bit too douchey for my tastes.

The strength of this book is the same strength I have found with every Krakauer I have read, he knows how to write a sequence of events in a manner that is interesting, and all encompassing. This book does an awesome job of conveying the absolute majesty of Everest, and how insignificant mankind really is when it tries to conquer nature. Mount Everest is not a hospitable place, and the book constantly makes the reader aware of how difficult trying to ascend it is, even in these “modern” times with all our gadgets, etc.

Krakauer also writes with a candidness and appraising eye that I appreciated. He even turns that sharp eye on himself, it just did not work for me, as noted above. And that is really it in a nutshell. Krakauer writes best when he is not a subject of his writing. I suspect that is true of most folks, so no hard feelings on my part on that account.

Another strength is the amount of technical knowledge that the author conveys in a mostly enjoyable manner. He knows this stuff firsthand. And it comes across in the details. Greatly enjoyed that aspect of it.

I am glad I read INTO THIN AIR, but I would read other Krakauer if you have not done so, before you read this one.

Kawał genialnego reportażu. Bardzo polecam!!!!!

This is not a review. I don’t feel like writing a review for this book, but I feel like I should at least say something about it because I did enjoy it. I mean, it did make me utter “Jesus Christ” out loud more than one time, and I don’t often talk to myself while I am reading a book.

(I almost want to post a picture of a LOLcat with a caption that says “This buk wuz gud,” but I don’t have one.)

So…These are a few things I learned from reading this book:

1. If a person decides to climb Everest, they are likely to encounter dead bodies along the route up to the summit.

2. Lobuje, which is on the way to Everest Base Camp, is a place that overflows with human excrement. While Krakauer was there in 1996, he wrote "Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it." Lovely. Insert “Want to get away from it all?” commercial here.

3. Without the assistance of Sherpas, it is unlikely that climbers would be able to reach the summit at all. Besides schlepping tons of your crap, they also know the way, and they place climbing ropes and in some instances, repair ladders, so people will be able to ascend the trickier places.

The place would also be a lot dirtier without them because they are partially responsible for removing some of the trash that Everest has accumulated over the years. One camp reported having around a thousand empty canisters of supplemental oxygen (as I said below in a review comment, so I might as well stick it in here, too).

4. In 1996, it cost $65,000 to be a client on a guided tour climbing Everest.

5. It is very easy to develop high-altitude sicknesses and/or hallucinations as a climber gets closer to the summit. In fact, the "every man/woman for him/herself" attitude that people had, whether or not they had to have it in order to survive, was more than a little disturbing.

On this particular excursion, two climbers got stuck on the mountain during a storm. They spent the night at 28,000 feet without shelter or supplemental oxygen and were believed to be dead. The guide sent to look for them the next day found them barely breathing after chipping off three inches of ice from their faces. Believing that they were beyond help, he left them there. One of the climbers, my personal hero, woke up from his coma hours later and was lucid enough to get himself back down to one of the camps. Sure, he lost half an arm, his nose, and all of the digits on his other hand to frostbite, but he's still alive.

Oh, and sure, the events that happened on Mt. Everest in 1996 were tragic, but I do think the people who climb it know what they are risking.

Enjoyed the book. Very enlightening of how the human body reacts to high altitudes, and how important even the smallest decision is to survival. Was surprised of the extremely unsanitary conditions upon arrival at the Lobuje village climbers had to endure, and the cost for permits to climb, YIKES!!