bruns_rick's Full Review: Jon Krakauer - Into Thin Air: A Personal Account o...
This book's phenomenal popularity shows us more than the obvious fact that people everywhere have long been fascinated with the highest peak on earth. Once Krakauer's book is in your hands, its subtitle tells you why you're going to read his Everest book: "A personal account of the Mount Everest disaster."
Very personal it is, and the events he describes will forever be remembered as the disaster on Everest, though the mountain has claimed more than 150 lives. In May 1996, Krakauer ascended the 29,000-foot Himalayan peak, as a journalist and one of eight clients of Rob Hall, a New Zealander who had become one of the best of an extremely elite group of climbers who lead adventurers of lesser ability up Everest. If fortune and the mountain, called "mother of the world" or "goddess of the sky" by the local peoples, smiled on them, they would reach the summit, descend, and live to tell the tale.
While Hall's crew, another group led by a rival, Scott Fischer, and others were working their way up, a team led by an American Everest veteran, David Breashears, arrived to attempt not only the climb but filming it in IMAX format, using special, cumbersome camera equipment to capture the panoramic immensity of the roof of the world. Members of their international group included Jamling Norgay, a sherpa whose father Tenzing was first to reach the summit with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953; and climbers from Japan, Austria and Spain (a woman of phenomenal physique and grace).
When a violent storm suddenly enshrouded the peak, the IMAX crew witnessed from their camp the horror that unfolded. They helped in the rescue effort before reaching the summit themselves. Four of Krakauer's group, including Hall, and five more climbers from other groups, including Fischer, died. Each reader will find a personal reference point among the all-too-human climbers and gain a unique insight from the book. Couple this with seeing the IMAX film, and an incredible story surrounds you in its awesome reality.
Krakauer explains why exactly the disaster happened, and more, why anyone attempts Everest. It began when two heroes of the successful 1963 American expedition, Thomas Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, returned home. Krakauer, then a boy in Oregon, played with Unsoeld's children. Soon, climbing was his life. "Secretly, I dreamed of ascending Everest myself one day," he writes. "Boyhood dreams die hard, I discovered, and good sense be damned."
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