|
|
Whistle Stopper - Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
|
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $4.95
Your Save: $ 10.00 ( 67% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Anchor
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.522092
EAN: 9780385494786
ISBN: 0385494785
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1999-10-19
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 1999-10-19
Studio: Anchor
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Utterly riveting, un-put-downable
Comment: Into Thin Air is a true account of a fatal expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 1996. Jon Krakauer, a journalist and hobby mountaineer, went with a group of climbers on their quest for the summit in order to document the effort for an American publication. Due to bad weather, some poor choices, and competition between summit guide companies, four of the five teammates in his climbing group never made it back down the mountain.
The book seems to be a way for Krakauer to purge some of the demons that have plagued him since Everest, but also a tangible way to factually account for how disaster struck the expedition. Krakauer takes great pains throughout the book to honor the memory of those climbers who perished during the descent.
I learned so much from this book. I never understood how risky climbing such a high peak was - the freezing cold, the unbelievably thin air, the tiny ridges which must be navigated, the crazy interdependence you must share with the other climbers on the mountain. Without bottled oxygen, most climbers would never make it to the top and back. The incredible lack of oxygen at high altitudes causes swelling in the brain, leads to fluid seepage into the lungs, etc. Combined with the freezing cold and the probability of bad weather, it's a miracle that anyone makes it up the mountain and back down in reasonably good health. The more I read this book, the more I understood how truly crazy you have to be to undertake climbing Everest.
I also found the commercialization of climbing Everest utterly mesmerizing. Experienced guides can charge clients $70,000 a pop to guide them to the summit, and competition among guides for business is cutthroat. So, in some cases, you may see guides who are taking risks to get clients to the summit because they've anted up the money AND because guides want a high success rate of getting clients to the top. (A success rate they can later emphasize in order to drum up new business.)
This would all be capitalism as usual, of course, if getting to the top of the mountain wasn't such a risk of life and limb. Krakauer mentions on more than one occasion that one could frequently see corpses on one's way up (or down) the mountain, a sad fact of how dangerous the endeavor can be.
Although this book isn't a pleasure to read (it's more of a clammy-hands, up all night kind of venture, as you are desperate to complete the book), the story is gripping and true. Krakauer goes to great pains to demonstrate the veracity of his account, with footnotes and a lengthy response to those who have criticized his documentation of events. At heart, the man is a journalist, and he fact-checks via exhaustive interviews with other climbers on the mountain and cites from interviews individuals have granted to other outlets to bolster his account.
I found it a fascinating tale of one of the deadliest seasons the mountain has ever seen. Not to be missed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Mountain Madness
Comment: "..I hoped that something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity's immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish."
As an avid mountain climber in his youth, Jon had always wanted to climb the Everest. However, as he grew up his dreams faded away into the practicality of a family life. All that changed dramatically when Outside magazine, where he was a contributing editor, commissioned him to write a story about the commercialization of Everest, and agreed to fund him to go all the way to the top as part of Rob Hall's guided expedition of 1996.
The expedition ended in a disaster, when on summit day, a storm blew up out of nowhere and several members of Hall's expedition, as well as Scott Fischer's guided expedition got stuck on the slopes on the way back from the summit.
Five people from the 2 expeditions died as a direct result of the storm, including the two leaders Hall and Fischer. Of course, Jon and many others survived through that difficult day, and many (including Jon) successfully climbed the summit.
Into Thin Air is a chillingly personal and detailed account of this episode. Jon's book gives a detailed description of all the people who were on the peak at that time and the incidents leading upto the disaster and beyond. At times his too-honest approach doesn't hold back from questioning the judgments of several individuals, some of whom died, and many of whom are still alive.
Jon is equally critical of himself, and hasn't spared himself in his analysis of the events around the calamity. "My actions - or failure to act - played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety."
Into Thin Air raises many difficult moral questions, wrapped inside the tortuous circumstances in which these individuals were coping with the effect of lack of oxygen to the brain. Instead of choosing to answer them in his own way and make judgments of right and wrong, Jon chooses to lay every fact in front of the reader to let them form their own conclusions.
Jon's book is a must read for those who aspire to challenge themselves physically, by going to the Everest or otherwise. But it's also a must read for many of us who encounter situations in our lives where we have to make instant and tough decisions in circumstances where our intellect and emotional control can be excused for failing itself, and where each action can significantly impact the lives of others. While Jon's book isn't a moral guide of any sort, it does force us to introspect by introducing us to an extreme situation which most us of would likely never encounter.
Into This Air is written in a fast paced narrative style, almost like a fiction thriller with some drama thrown in. Go read this book -it's guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seats.
P.S. : The title of this review is borrowed from the name of Scott Fischer's adventure company.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Rare Insight into a Perilous Set of Events
Comment: This book is both an engrossing account of a perilous journey up Mt. Everest...the "top of the world"...and a deeper study of what drives individuals to willingly take on great, and known, risks. It is this unique balance of best-seller caliber action and deeper content that make "Into Thin Air" stand out for me.
Krakauer's writing caters to a wide audience and he brings credibility and first-hand experience to the subject matter. When delving into the larger question of what drives people to take on risk, however, his own point of view looms large. As the title of this book includes the words, "A Personal Account," this is understandable, but I found the author's personal outlook overshadowed the theme of life and risk.
Overall, this is a book well worth reading. It offers a gripping account of a harrowing set of events in the loftiest areas on Earth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It's a Book you can Learn to Despise the Author
Comment: Even though the title of the review is what it is, the book does has some interesting tidbits about high altitude mountaineering. For non climbers and arm-chair adventurers it would satisfy you, as the author writes well. You'll learn some intrinsic details, enough to keep the "how and what" types occupied. For this the book gets it's two stars -- good writing and technical details (like the effects of high altitude sickness).
But what makes this book really hard to stomach though, and how a reader can learn to despise the author, is how critical the author is about those in the expedition. Usually I like to know the "real story" in adventure disasters, to know the interpersonal reactions (like the character chemistry in the Scott South Pole Expedition), yet I draw the line at common decency. The Japanese woman climber, he complained about what she carried, claiming it helped to contribute in her death. That cold. Then in the end of the book the author tells of how he tries to cope with the tragedy, and the death of the very people he was critical over. It comes off self-serving, and after the meat puppetry, even put on. Guess the author tries to cope with some anger and denial, which means he didn't recover enough after the tragedy to write the book without it, and would explain how upsetting a read this book can be.
Get the book if you like mountaining stories. Get it for some history (some tidbits about the IMAX expedition in the book). But don't get it if you have a heart, you'll be wanting to tear pages out of the book as he pokes the dead in the eyes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Comment: Of all the books that I have read, this is the best. Absolutely fascinating. And, in my opinion, it's an adventure story that can be enjoyed by folks who aren't necessarily into mountain climbing. My dad gave this book to me as a gift, and he being a writer himself had told me that he thought it was one of the best books he had ever read. I've since given it as a gift to a few of my friends. Also, another fun book by Krakauer is Eiger Dreams, which is a collection of short climbing/survival stories. I'd highly recommend Into Thin Air!
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more--including Krakauer's--in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer's epic account of the May 1996 disaster.
By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer's highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber's death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others' actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself.
This updated trade paperback edition of Into Thin Air includes an extensive new postscript that sheds fascinating light on the acrimonious debate that flared between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukreev in the wake of the tragedy. "I have no doubt that Boukreev's intentions were good on summit day," writes Krakauer in the postscript, dated August 1999. "What disturbs me, though, was Boukreev's refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision. Never did he indicate that perhaps it wasn't the best choice to climb without gas or go down ahead of his clients." As usual, Krakauer supports his points with dogged research and a good dose of humility. But rather than continue the heated discourse that has raged since Into Thin Air's denouncement of guide Boukreev, Krakauer's tone is conciliatory; he points most of his criticism at G. Weston De Walt, who coauthored The Climb, Boukreev's version of events. And in a touching conclusion, Krakauer recounts his last conversation with the late Boukreev, in which the two weathered climbers agreed to disagree about certain points. Krakauer had great hopes to patch things up with Boukreev, but the Russian later died in an avalanche on another Himalayan peak, Annapurna I.
In 1999, Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a prestigious prize intended "to honor writers of exceptional accomplishment." According to the Academy's 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."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
