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

adventurous dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Reading this was like watching a trainwreck in slow motion and being unable to look away.

It’s a fascinating story of a what people are able to endure with bits of history sprinkled in. You see the physical and mental toll that climbing Everest takes, how it impairs decision making, and all the little mistakes that kept adding up. 

It’s honestly very hard to read at times and I cried. A lot. I honestly was not expecting to be so upset when I knew what was going to happen, but something about it really touched me. I think it was the combination of this being a first hand account and the way Krakauer writes that makes you so invested. 

That being said, I don’t particularly like Krakauer. Sometimes his opinions rubbed me the wrong way, but this is his view of what happened which is still valid. I just took some of his comments with a grain of salt. 

Would I say I enjoyed this? I don’t know. It was hard to read about people experiencing a very traumatic event, but I couldn’t put it down as morbid as that sounds. 

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