Rating: 
Summary: Tragic Adventure Story
Review: I remember several years when Newsweek ran an excerpt from Jon Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air, not too long after that deadly season on Mt. Everest. It sounded like an interesting story.I forgot about it until I was high up in the Cascades of Central Oregon on a vacation and wanted something to read. I picked this book up (sticking with the mountain theme of course!) and found it to be one that was difficult to put down. First, it's a book that you'll enjoy even if you're not a climber. There's not anything overly technical in the book. It's more of a humans vs. the elements story. Into Thin Air is written with great hindsight and had to have been painful and yet cathartic for the author to write, as he was part of the expedition. He paints a very clear picture from a unique perspective of what it is like to climb Everest and what type of person takes on the challenge. You get a look at the climbers coming together and starting the ascent from base camp. You get to see who these people are and then how they react in a life and death struggle. The book shows how small mistakes, a creeping sense of invincibility and even a little greed all came together to form a major disaster. Into Thin Air is also triumphant in the stories of those who barely survived, but still got down the mountain, which as Krakauer says, is the hardest part of a summit run. This is definitely a book to have if you enjoy true stories of outdoor adventure, and you can't beat the price!
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down
Review: I've done rock climbing in gyms and some outside stuff. Have seen the adds for mountain expiditions in the back of climbing magazines in the late 90's and have always wondered what that would be like. Now I know... 8^) I couldn't put this book down, read it in two nights. Krakauer talks about what each day is like and what they experience. Each ascent to climatize and then the final push for the summit. The symptoms of altitude sickness and the perils of the death zone. If you have any interest in climbing, this is a must read!
Rating:
Summary: Extraoirdinary Folks questing for beyond rationally possible
Review: WE all know the principal players, WE all know why who went where and for what reasons, and Everest, inexorably drawing them upwards through the much feared Khumba ice falls. At least we, the reader has an expectation that the writer is along to record his observations, polish his prose to achieve the story he was sent to obtain....Being, Jon Krakauer, I expected him to be at the forefront of all things, as for him it was so transparent that this gig provided the means to DO IT, to CLIMB EVEREST and that he would be so drawn into the team, his friends. His friends were dying out there and Jon is examining with surgical precsion what could HE have done differently. I find myself so drawn to these people.Jon makes you care about each and every one of the team members.They had big dreams, some still do. I am grateful to have gotten to meet them, if only, through this book;...Beck Weathers - read his book, Sandy Hill Pittman - can't hardly find anything written nicely about her. [Heck], she had a job to do too! The way so much of this was portrayed in the media - it was as if it was episodes of ... THE REAL WORLD done in the death zone. I would climb a mountain and toss down a cold one with any of these folks at any time. They were not merely rich dilitanttes on holiday...They had the "right stuff" when it counted. Into Thin Air cuts through all the negativity>
Rating: 
Summary: Adventure or Hubris?
Review: Krakauer does a thourough and professional job of reporting with ample historic and technical background. I really have no argument with the structure or workmanship of the book. I think that I am dissapointed by the relentlessly dark narrative that concludes with a single ghastly anecdote and not a shred of hope or redemption. "Into Thin Air" chronicles the lives and senseless deaths of people caught up in their own close-knit world of acheivement for acheivement's sake. The Everest expeditions described in this book were populated largely by wealthy people purchasing an accomplishment for a handsome fee. Their self-serving mission ends in disaster and death. Krakauer trys, admirably, to take his share of the blame without speaking ill of the dead. At best he draws the reader into his own regrets and depression and concludes that the cimb was senseless and tragic. There is little nobility, redemption, or contribution to society in these pages; just a journal of broken dreams and needless suffering that becomes self-agrandising and distasteful. In my opinion time ill spent.
Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating story of the human spirit
Review: This book is Jon Krakauer's first hand account of his 1996 climb up Mt. Everest with a climbing group led by the renowned Rob Hall. This season is known as the deadliest season in the history of Everest. I like how this book is written because Krakauer doesn't set out to make anyone, not even himself, look like some sort of hero in this incident. It seems as if he tells the story as it was according to his memory, and the heroes just naturally shine through. As I read this book, I encountered many emotions. There were points where I felt joy for great accomplishments and sadness for losses. There were people who I just looked upon with great disdain. I also feel for Jon Krakauer who seems to spend his life with many regrets over that tremendous night of loss. Overall, I found this book to be a very good read.
Rating:
Summary: Into Thin Air
Review: Jon Krakauer does a great job describing the incident and not leaving out and details. As you read it, it almost seems as if you're on the mountain along with the characters. This book is very vivid and compelling, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to read a good action book.
Rating:
Summary: Biased View of a Cocky Author
Review: I felt that the book is very well written, and important to life and all people shole read this book. It is skillfuly written. The only thing that held it back was the biased oppion of the author. He wrote the book as if he was the better than anyperson climbing that year. He was a real cocky writter and that made the book only a little less injoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Wow, Wow, Wow- And it's A True Story
Review: Okay, this book starts a little slow (as in the very, very beginning, a few pages), but it picks up pace so quickly that the book is finished within hours. For me, personally, to finish a book within hours is a miracle, simply because I lose interest in anything rather quickly, but not with this book. The story is told in a way that the reader is allowed to identify with the characters (there are a lot of them to learn)in a way that make you want to know what happened to them. You know there's going to be a disaster, but it is all of the events leading up to, during, and following it that are interesting. There is so much suspense that you can't help but continue, at least to the next chapter (or so you tell youself) until the book is done. It honestly surprised me how good this book was. After reading it, if you happen upon anyone else who read it, you can talk for hours about it; the mountain; and anything relating (literally, hours -- this one person I was talking to even got around to the IMAX film about it -- these conversations can stray, so beware). One person I know even went to the mountain for 6 months just to be there after reading the novel. It's inspiring. If you need a good book to read, that's thoroughly interesting, fast paced, and has pictures (yes! there are pictures too!), then this is the book for you. Then knowing it all actually happened adds to it even more.
Rating:
Summary: A stunning, tragic read
Review: Call it curiosity, call it an absorbing adventure, or blame it on the fact that I was sick in bed and couldn't really do anything but read. Or just call it a disturbing report of the last days of some fascinating people, a report that is written so tightly that you can't put it down because it won't let you. This is what Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" was for me. It is so rare that a piece of fact-based or even historical narrative works so well as a book. I credit the author's sensitive ears and eyes, which allowed him to recreate the speech and look of a cast of disparate characters in what becomes one of the saddest accounts of hubris and tragic ill-fatedness I have ever read. What is most impressive to me about this book, though, is the delicate balance Krakauer is able to strike between his own guilt at having survived to tell the story (something Holocaust historians refer to as "survivor guilt") and his own need to tell it. There is a fair amount of perhaps justified self-flagellation, but at no point does it overwhelm the narrative. Otherwise put, Krakauer treats the tragedy with enough reverence not to bury it under the story of his own guilt; "Into Thin Air" may bill itself as "A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster," but Krakauer makes certain that it is not about him, for it is about those who were lost and those who loved them. This is driven home powerfully in the epilogue, during which the author presents some quite harsh criticism leveled against him by victims' families, and he does so without responding, without succumbing to the temptation to get the last word in despite his being in a prime position to do so. "Into Thin Air," like all great books, tells us about much more than the episode that is its most local concern. The culprit in this story--and this is made clear on so many levels--is money. Everest is now a commercial venture, the book makes clear, and mountaineering companies feeling the financial pinch are forced to "summit" climbers who are perhaps not ready or worthy of summiting, just to keep good word of mouth going, just to keep new clients coming, just to stay in business. Krakauer gives us an alternative to this, though, in his well-researched and thoughtfully presented historical snippets. There was a time, we learn, when those who knew Everest best knew it as an adventure, and not as an economic enterprise. When the curiosity of the explorers becomes the claim-staking of the colonizers--when venture capital must be protected--questions that should arise are beaten back. Everest was far too high a peak to be carelessly embroiled in bottom lines, and, in this book as in life, too much attention to the bottom line means suffering at a much higher cost. Krakauer is careful not to pound this point home, but he makes it felt. All of this aside, though, "Into Thin Air" is quite simply a well-written, brilliantly told, and carefully respectful rendering of a sad, sad chapter in the lives of some beautiful and brave human beings.
Rating:
Summary: simply superb
Review: I rarely am moved enough to write any review. The product must be beyond excellence to warrant the time. "Into Thin Air" is such a product. This is a riveting detailed transcript of the most extraordinary of nightmares played out on the worlds highest stage, Mt Everest.
The author leaves you little time for rest as this harrowing factual tale unfolds.
Simply superb!
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