Into Thin Air

Rating:
Summary: Suspenseful
Review: The author's reaccount of their experience on Everest leaves and amazing impression of danger, courage, the harshness of the elements, and survival luck. Local myth and culture worship the mountain and pray for the adventures to return. How do people act in the most harsh climate in the world? The real miracle is not submitting Everest but getting down. So expect tradegy and overconfidence to be the central theme. The Book has a very clean, honest, and high energy feel.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting
Review: This book is the best written novel I have ever read, and at twelve I have read a lot. The details are so amazing. He takes the accounts of what happened on the mountain and added a personal history to every single thing that added another world to the novel. A type of world that lets you get up close and personal with the real life people this novel is based on. Krakauer vividly describes the beauty of the mountain and the terrifying nature of it at the same time. His details allow the reader to experience things only a few hundred people in the entire world have experienced. When you are reading, you can feel the cold of the below zero temperatures running through your bones. You feel sad when a person gets left behind but you also feel sorry for the person leaving him behind. He portrays the characters in an incredible way that catches every emotion. The story of what happened is astonishing by itself, but when Krakauer adds his journalistic touch it becomes even better.

Rating:
Summary: On the folly of mountain climbing
Review: There's no denying that Krakauer is a good writer, and that the events and people of which he writes are interesting. But the fact of the matter remains is that the "past-time" to which these people have devoted--and in some cases sacrificed--their lives is an excellent example of man's propensity to forsake reason and logic in the pursuit of illusory goals. To devote oneself to climbing mountains for the sake of thrills and notarity ultimately serves no useful purpose, and simply gratifies the ego of the climber. Sadly, the mindset of the mountain climber resembles that of the gallant soldier of yore who with nonsensical and misguided idealism would willingly shirk all concern for self for the sake of some ultimately pointless objective. Were these people to come to the rational conclusion it should not be man's place to conquer everything on this planet (and subsequently turn that which is conquered into a gigantic playground) and that one can attain much greater and sincere rewards by revering the mountain from a distance, they'd have my undying respect. But as it stands, I have no sympathy for these people whatsoever.

Rating:
Summary: When Nature Puts the Smack-Down
Review: It's easy to forget how powerful nature really is, what with all the modern technological advances. This book is a very well-put together account of what happens to people following the "What could possibly go wrong? It could never happen to me." philosophy.

Krakauer provides informative insights to the people that climbed Everest that year, along with good presentation of the mountain climber culture. The Everest landscape is well crafted, and manages to capture the history and some of the society surrounding the mountain. If you liked the Perfect Storm, you should check out Into Thin Air.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! But not perfect.
Review: An event as big as the 1996 Everest disaster is always going to be difficult to convey with any accuracy, due, as Krakauer himself says, to the inconsistencies of memory, especially when above 26,000 feet where everyone is suffering from hypoxia. That said, however, Krakauer does a masterful job of portraying his own struggles on the mountain. Furthermore, with a little conjecture based on his first-hand knowledge of the mountain and the people involved, he does make some seemingly-accurate suppositions on the whys and the wherefores of the event.

The book starts really slowly. I found it a struggle to get through the first 150 pages, because we meet the people, we meet the mountain, we meet Jon Krakauer, and it seems merely to plod along. It is when the book enters its description of the May 10 summit push that it really comes into its own. While the first 150 pages feel unnecessary when you read them, once you hit the climax, you find that without those 150 pages you wouldn't know the people so intimately and thus the tragedy would not feel quite so shocking and heart-rending.

The trouble with Krakauer's writing is that he appears to sit on a fence regarding opinion while in actuality he does anything but. In 'Into Thin Air', as with 'Into The Wild', he dodges making any explicit assertions, and yet in the way he writes you can sense his unspoken prejudices coming through. Not that there is anything wrong with having an opinion - Joe Simpson openly fills his books with his own prejudices - but Krakauer pretends to be objective and then by, for example, quoting somebody else giving an opinion and juxtaposing it with a description of action, reveals himself to be as opinionated as any writer. For example, after quoting somebody that it is 'irresponsible' for a guide not to use supplemental oxygen, he innocently mentions that Anatoli Boukreev declined to use supplemental oxygen. Later, because of his apparent dislike for Boukreev, he underplays that Boukreev, despite making it all the way to the summit and back, also went out into the storm to rescue three people, and on the next day climbed back up the mountain in the storm to try and rescue Scott Fischer while Krakauer was lying unconscious in his tent. Not that I am criticising Krakauer for his exhaustion - I am in no position to judge - but after vilifying Boukreev's 'poor judgement' more than once throughout the narrative, it would have been fair to then give him some credit for what amounted to a superhuman effort up on that mountain. And let's face it, if Boukreev was being 'irresponsible' because lack of oxygen weakened him, how come he did more than any other individual on that mountain? There is little evidence of his hypoxia-induced weakness, especially when one considers that a month before Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, he was awarded the David Sowles Memorial Award for his valour on May 10 and May 11, 1996. While Krakauer may think that Boukreev was irresponsible, the climbing world in general vehemently disagrees.

In the main, this is a great if inconsistent book. It is an event that will always hold terrific sway in the minds of mountaineers and the general public alike. If you liked reading about this event, and want views that both supplement and criticise Krakauer's view, then Joe Simpson's 'Dark Shadows Falling', Matt Dickinson's 'The Death Zone', and Beck Weathers' own 'Left For Dead' are great to read alongside this book.

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling
Review: Into Thin Air recounts the trials and tribulations of the many expeditions assaulting the summit of Mount Everest in the Spring of 1996, but focuses on the team led by Rob Hall. Krakauer brings a very knowledgeable background to the book as he was an avid climber even before the Everest disaster. Instead of using solely secondhand accounts to tell of the debacle, Krakauer was actually on the mountain making the summit push himself. Krakauer is able to tell of all the difficulties one can run into on the way to the summit among them, frostbite, exhaustion, wind and the thin air. Along with his own recollection of the events, Krakauer borrowed from his comrades on the mountain and even included stories told by relatives. It is a story of success, failure and heartache. In the end, even if you aren't a climber, it is well worth the read. If you like Krakauer, I would also try "Into the Wild."

Rating:
Summary: Very Well Written
Review: Krakauer does an amazing job of describing the events that lead up to and after the disaster on Everest happens. Krakauer is a journalistic writer, so do not expect a story that has been "spiced up". He put a lot of effort into making sure the story he was telling was an accurate representation of what happens. That includes interviewing several people that were on the mountain at the same time the tragedy happened.

Overall this was one of the better non-fiction books I have read. It is definitely not hard to read and could be enjoyed by almost anyone. When an author is one of the main characters in a book you would expect quite a few biases; that is not the case in Into Thin Air.

Rating:
Summary: Into another adventure
Review: As a 9 to 5 office person I've found "Into Thin Air" extremely adventurous and inspiring. A reminder that the world is much more than our developed cities and office cubicles. Krakauer leads you through this adventure in great details that you could be gasping for air as pages turned.

Rating:
Summary: Into Thin Air Book Review
Review: Into Thin Air describes a riveting adventure of the summit of the tallest mountain in the world told by one of the climbers and journalist Jon Krakauer. Jon was invited to go on the expedition by the Outside magazine. He gives a first hand experience of how being "on the top of the world" can start out so wonderful and plunge to a life threatening adventure. This book will make you wonder why people are so crazy to even attempt such a goal. For others it will make a passion for climbing even greater than before you read it.

From what Krakauer writes, it is noticeable that he has definitely had some first hand experience of climbing before he summated Mount Everest. The amount of specific detail put into this book puts the expedition into reality. Krakauer gives examples to every day life so that the reader has a better knowledge of how much pain and misery the group went through while on the mountain. Krakauer uses his ability to re-create the expedition in you head and how bad the storm was that it feels like you are there on the mountain with him. This book is definitely for the type of reader who likes non-stop adventure and breath taking stories. This book doesn't follow the normal story outline because it follows base-by-base incidents and encounters. This can be a good thing because the reader can't really predict what happens next so it always keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. I definitely encourage anyone who likes any type of adventure to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Into Thin Air
Review: Jon Krakauer does an outstanding job in describing how life was like up on top of the tallest mountain in the world in the thrilling and adventurous book Into Thin Air. He was previously a writer for Outside Magazine. Through the use of his vivid details, Jon's account of his first hand experience on top of Mt. Everest quickly grasps the attention of the reader, evokes numerous emotions, and enables the reader to understand, in depth, the extent of the hardships one can face in a dangerous environment. When Jon and his teammates were assigned to climb Mt. Everest, some of them were not properly prepared to ascent the mountain. I thought it was reckless and just plain stupid to face the most titanic mountain in the world and not come prepared to accomplish that feat. In the following quote one can see how addicting this book can get while reading it. "Instead of turning my oxygen off, Harris, in his hypoxically impaired state, had mistakenly cranked the valve open to full flow, draining the tank. I'd just squandered the last of my gas going nowhere. There was another tank waiting for me at the South Summit, 250 feet below, but to get there I would have to descent the most exposed terrain on the entire rout without the benefit of supplemental oxygen." Page 10.
The theme that Jon Krakauer is trying to portray is, if you are going to try to take on Mother Nature, then you better be prepared to face the consequences that go with it. Obviously Jon faced horrifying consequences while descending the mountain on May 10th, 1996 by suffering from frostbite and losing all of his teammates.
I would recommend Into Thin Air to those who are adventurous at heart. While reading, I felt as if I was transported into Jon Krakaur's climb up Everest, because of his use of such descriptive words. For these reasons and many others, I recommend the book Into Thin Air.