bngelb 's review for:

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
5.0
adventurous emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced
Wow.

How gripping and tense, especially the chapters detailing the summit assault on May 10 1996. I remember staying up til the AM, unable to put the book down, with my breath caught in my chest. 

I gave this book 5 stars because 1) the story is captivating, and 2) Jon Krakauer is such a crisp writer. The prose is fantastic. He prefaces that he wrote this "as an act of catharsis", setting the expectation that this is a personal piece of writing, and making the read that much more gripping.

I appreciated how the book was structured and how it remained coherent. Reading the context (e.g. historical mountaineering information on Everest, characterisation of expedition members, etc) never become tiresome. In fact it only added to the gargantuan and untamed personification of Everest, or it brought life to recurring names. I fully admit to becoming invested in their success despite knowing the outcome... though Krakauer does a good job as staying as objective as possible, it is still emotional. Dread steadily mounts as the book carries on, and an immense sense of loss stayed with me through the last ~third of the book. 

What a compelling yet harrowing story. I will have to read The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev.

My thoughts on the controversy
After finishing, I decided to look at the criticisms around this book. I too was irked by Krakauer's slighting portrayal of Sandy Hill Pittman and Anatoli Boukreev, though it's important to remember that the whole truth is not comprised from just one person's perspective.

Is it not human nature to "to catalog the myriad blunders in order to “learn from the mistakes”"? We assume that those seeking to climb Everest hope to return in triumph regaling stories of adventure, and instead Krakauer is left with reflections on survival and guilt. Naturally, he was probably searching for an explanation as to why things panned out the way they did. You can see this behaviour with everyone else after the fact: the returnees were bombarded with interviews, received multiple letters, sought out by the victim's families, had others "dissecting the tragic events of 1996 in minute detail".

I'm thus more forgiving of Krakauer's account of Pittman and Boukreev. Driven naturally by human nature and even more so by journalistic calling, he needed to find reasons whilst in a vulnerable state.
It is natural to be angry in the face of loss, and he even offers several other factors that contributed to the disaster, as well as the multitude of errors made by several people including his own. With this in mind, I say of course he was going to be more critical towards people that he deems as having made mistakes.

On top of this, Krakauer always seems to own his crap. He says that his "actions -- or failure to act -- played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris". In the Postscript, he acknowledges that he probably doesn't understand Anatoli Boukreev, and provides additional context to Boukreev's background growing up in Kazakhstan's mountains that may explain the decisions made during the expedition. He never shies away from other people's truths. 

This book should be read with the following in mind: this is a journalistic x personal recount of a traumatic event that was written less than a year after the event had occurred. I think having this in mind will remind readers why Krakauer has chosen to include certain aspects in this story. 
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