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

I don’t think I have ever been interested in mountaineering. I just don’t care about getting to the top of mountains. I may have been born too late for the crazy. All of earth’s peaks have been pioneered by the pioneers, and now the rest of us have to look for new challenges, like eating tide pods. Or perhaps I just wasn’t the most imaginative kid in the world, as I never relished the idea of being the first person to do much of anything.

Jon Krakauer did have those fantasies. Mount Everest was an unrealized high school love for him, and that resulted in the book you have here. It’s the story of his own journey up the famous mountain, and the various tragedies that resulted in numerous deaths.

Krakauer was another high school author for me, though the book we had to read then was “Into the Wild,” which was thematically similar to this as that story also involved a person who took the ‘fuck around and find out’ route with mother nature, and found out. With that book I enjoyed to what extent Krakauer oscillated between writing about the character in such a way as to make the reader admire him, only to end the next chapter in such a way as to make us say ‘what was the moron thinking?’. In Into Thin Air, there is something of a similar feeling, but it is much more sorrowful. The book follows is about an ill-fated journey of a group of mountaineers descending from the peak of the mountain. Despite this having happened in my life time, I knew nothing about this story before reading the book.

The moral of the story here seems to be ‘mountaineering is hard’. While reading the book, I didn’t get what was meant to be shocking about that. Perhaps shocking isn’t what the author was after with all this, but as the book progressed with more and more mentions of victims, I found myself asking “what results were these people expecting?” I am not sure I got a satisfying answer to that. I always assumed mountaineering was difficult, and that causalities were meant to happen. But as the book progresses, it becomes clear that some of these deaths were preventable, had things shaken out in a different way. The pages are pretty heavy with Krakauer’s guilt regarding the events that passed, although I don’t feel like he was much as fault for what happened. But I doubt that will make him sleep well at night.