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Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $20.37
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book was an amazing read. It is an incredible story of human tragedy but also the will to survive. I read it in a day and a half as I couldnt put it down. Great narrating left me feeling like I was on the mountain.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: On the edge
Review: This book was one of the best books i have read all year. If you like action adventure this one is for you. As I was reading I could see my self climbing aside with Jon and his team. I could feel and see the struge. In this book I could feel the disapointments and tryumpth they went throught. This book never left my hands it was great i this you should get it and read it for your self.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Book
Review: Into Thin Air is a good book to read. It could have been great if it wouldn't have put so much history in the book. If it would have focused on the struggles of the climbers more it would have go that last star. This book is a good example of the will of the human to survive in the harshest of enivironments. I enjoyed reading it and I would recommend it to others.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: brilliant presentation vividly shows Moiunt everest
Review: Mount Everest has exerted an irresistable pull on the public imagination. Krakauer's book expands on his own piece from Outside magazine.

At the time of the 1996 expedition that Krakauer accompanied, 130 people had died on Everest since 1921. That's about 1 in 4 of those making the attempt. However, in 1985 a professional climber escorted amatuer Dick Bass to the top & opened the Mountain to commercial exploitation by pros leading guided trips. As Weathers Beck, a 49 year old pathologist from Krakauer's group, says, "Assuming you're reasonably fit and have some disposable income (as much as $75,000), I think the biggest obstacle is probably taking time off from your job and leaving your family for two months." One of the guides tells Krakauer, "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 summitt."

But one question, & perhaps the most important one, goes unanswered; What business do these people have even trying to climb Mount Everest? Krakauer is 41 years old & his marriage has nearly foundered in the past because of his devotion to climbing. He says that he began to climb because "Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life." One almost pities a person who finds climbing to be the most concrete thing in their life.

The climbing season described in the book may be the best documented Himalayan season of all time. In addition to The Tragic Ambitions on Everest, individuals involved, the brilliant presentation vividly shows the mountain during that season and touches on the tragedy.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Determination
Review: Into thin air is mainly a book about how far your own determination and dreams can take you. Most people would say that the first chapters in the book are extremely boring because it went and described the most important people on the expidition, including the guides. I liked the first few chapters for the same reason, and also because it gave you a better link with people who climbed up the fateful expidition in 1996.
For a lot of the people on the expidition of Everest it was a dream come true. Especially for Yasuko Namba who was one of the slowest climbers and the one with the least experience, the one who was always at the back of the line; but she always went through another day determined to reach the summit. There was also Becker who had climbed Everest the year before and decided to give it another try, eventhough he had eye surgery which literally blinded him at high altitudes and 23000 is high altitude; but he kept climbing making sure his footsteps matched the guide's footsteps in front of him.
Everyone in the book had a reason to want to climb the mountain for the author Jon it was his lifelong dream that he had put off his whole life and the chance to write an article on the expidition was an excuse for him to finally climb Everest. For others like Doug Hanson there first time was a flop and they were determined that round two would allow them to reach the summit.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: MY Review For: Into Thin Air..
Review: I would first like to point out to those of you who will be reading this book. This book is very long. In fact it's 378 pages.I'm also not much of a reader myself, but this book caught my eye for the first few pages.
Jon Krakauer (the author of this book)started the book off being on Mount Everest, but to my disappointment he added too much information about the history about Mount Everest. I admit some of this information was needed but it lead on through the book too long which bored me.

When action part of the book began it was great.It kept me reading. This book shows you the effects of HAPE,which is the lost of oxygen to the brain when climbing high too fast.Also the importances of Mount Everest.For example if a sherpa(mountain guide)was to become ill,they were never to return to the mountain.
Krakauer wrote this book in a point of view to show a tribute to those who didn't make it down. Even now that he made it back down the mountain.He still shows signs of all the effects of the mountain. I love most about this book that it shows when someone has a goal, that they could died living it out.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: the best
Review: this was the best book i have ever read. It was a great story about the will to survive and the courage that some men have.You will not want to put this book down. It is a great book for anyone who is intrested in mountainering or just wants to enjoy a great story of survival.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Into Thin Air: The true Story
Review: Into Thin Air is a true story writen by a magazine writer and climber Jon Krakauer. Jon worte the history of Everest from how he was assigned to write a behined the scences story about it to how he stuggled to the summit and on the way down came faced with nature at it's worest. As he struggled down the mountain fighting to make it the camp he passed some of his fellow climbers who were dead or deing from the lack of oxygen and cold. Out of a group aorund 15 climbers, 6 made it back alive. When Jon returned to Seattle he felt horribly gulity and wrote this book for his friends who died on Everst.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Into Thin Air
Review: In no way am I a reader, I have never read for pleasure and don't like to read. But while I was forced to read the book Into Thin Air for my senior English class at Walla Walla High School, I found myself enjoying the book. Even though I was reading 40-50 pages a night, I just couldn't put it down. That is how good of a book I thought it was. It was a little boring in the beginning but it really picked up in the middle and towards the end. Once they got to the top of Mt. Everest and started on their way back down is when I could not put the book down. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. If you like to read or not, this book will suck you in until you are finished reading.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Merciless Sky
Review: INTO THIN AIR is a cautionary tale of egotism run amok. The story of the May 1996 climbing disaster on Everest as told by one of the survivors, Jon Krakauer succeeds in creating an impossible-to-put-down page turner of a story out of what is, in fact, a truly depressing tale of death, waste and selfishness.

While Krakauer does not have the poetic ability of Peter Matthiessen in THE SNOW LEOPARD, INTO THIN AIR is a workmanlike job of journalism which, like ALIVE, manages to capture a devastating moment in time. As a professional climber, Krakauer knows of what he speaks though he is quick to admit his own limitations as a mountaineer, an admission all the more telling, as he is one of the more experienced members of this guided climb up the tallest mountain on earth.

The tragedy's roots lie, first and foremost, in the fact that Mount Everest has become the quintessential "fast food" mountain. Although Krakauer defers from outright criticism , it is clear that the guided climbs will accept virtually anyone as a client as long as they have a healthy checkbook. There is no glory, no romance, no silence, no time for thought, and little need for skill on the flanks of the mountain. Everest has become a trash-strewn freeway for climbers of every stripe and talent (or not-talent). Krakauer writes uncritically of a "traffic jam" of a dozen climbers or more from multiple teams just below the summit which delayed both ascenders and descenders, perhaps fatally, but never remarks on the irony that the greatest peak on earth has become so tame.

Except of course that it hasn't. The altitude alone can cause climbers' hearts and brains to bleed, the lack of oxygen at 25,000 feet-plus can lead to confusion and impaired judgement on the part of even experienced climbers, the thin atmosphere can cause murderous hypothermia, and the weather---with Everest's spire thrust into the jet stream---is notoriously fickle.

Yet, Everest's mountaineers (guided and not) trudge by the dozen past the frozen bodies of those who have died on the mountain in failed attempts, apparently without reflection. The owners of the guided climb companies seem cavalier in the extreme, setting dates and times for ascent and descent which become extremely elastic in practice. Krakauer admits that it is hard to tell a client who has paid $65,000.00 to climb Everest that he can't push on to the summit, but the reader has to wonder what has happened to good judgement and professionalism? After all, a CPA from Des Moines should not be given a choice between ego and death, particularly when that death may be the death of others. The pollution and commercialization of Everest is sickening, and in a way, far more horrifying than the 100 degrees below zero snow gale in which these dozens of amateur climbers found themselves.

The storm which killed them was an act of nature, implacable and impersonal both. An inherent risk of climbing, Krakauer nonetheless spends a fair amount of time wondering what, if anything, could have been done to save his compatriots. At 29,000 feet can there be ethics in the lifeboat?

Krakauer is clearly drowning in survivor's guilt, but the reader suspects that had he attempted a rescue he might have joined the dead. And to what purpose?

INTO THIN AIR reminds us that nature is not Disneyland.


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