Reviews

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

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thembruff's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional sad medium-paced

5.0

alykat_reads's review

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fast-paced

4.0

Krakauer has a way of writing a page turner. I was engrossed and read the entire thing (besides the first 20 pages) all in one day of traveling.
He does state in this that not all things may be 100% 'factual' and that he had tried after the disaster to talk to other survivors and get their experiences, and collaborate stories.

I've watched and read other things on Everest, and while I'm certainly no expert, I'm also aware enough that there must be certain protocols while taking the climb. It seems that these were concepts that were realized in 1996, so it doesn't seem like it's a matter of it being 28 years later and being 'wiser'. It appears a lot of this was known at the time. I cannot wrap my brain around how there were seemingly many delays and 'mistakes' the morning of the ascent, yet very experienced climbers made such grave errors. Ofc, it's easy to say this at 906 feet elevation, but it seems like people who had summited Everest multiple times before wouldn't seem to make these mistakes that even I, someone who knows nothing about mountaineering, was like, wow, that seems like a large red flag to just casually ignore.

I feel like there's so much more to the story of this day (and subsequent 24-48 hours) that isn't being told. I've learned that Beck wrote Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest and I am absolutely interested in reading that to get his perspective on this day. I think my mouth literally dropped when he came walking into camp 12 hours after they chipped ice off his face and left him for dead. WILD. There are also a few others who have books about it, and I'd also like to read theirs as well for their perspectives on it.

I want to be clear though, I don't think this disaster happened due to the fault of any one person. I think a lot of people made many mistakes that probably would have not resulted in casualties had it remained a clear day and no ferocious storm hit that evening/night. I personally didn't read this as Krakauer necessarily blaming anyone for what happened but just explaining events as he experienced them. I can see how others could have seen it that way though, especially family members of those lost on the mountain that day. But at the end of the day, I think mistakes like this get made all the time on the climb to the summit of Everest, and that this day resulted in casualties because of the storm that came in that made those mistakes into deadly mistakes.