Book Review: "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer 4.5/5

For most of us, rolling off the couch for an hour long session of working out and ogling before primetime requires a depressingly modern form of energy drink induced willpower. For a few, like author Jon Krakauer and mountain climbers in general, will is something much more.

In, “Into Thin Air,” Krakauer’s personal account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, readers are introduced to a world where will is training for a year to fulfill a lifelong dream of climbing one of the world’s most hallowed peaks, continuing to climb despite bitter cold and increasingly oxygen depleted air, and turning back because of unfavorable conditions only hundreds of feet from the peak after a lifetime of dreaming and forking over thousands of dollars -- something that the climbers suffering from “Summit Fever” on May 10 could not do.

Krakauer’s gut wrenching, journalistically sound account makes it clear that the true danger in scaling Everett isn’t reaching the top but having the energy and clear mind to get back down. The novel, written as a catharsis over his survivor’s guilt only a year after the disaster, attempts to ask, what happened up there? What led experienced expedition leaders to make such egregious decisions?

Mainly the answers come in the form of varying high altitude sicknesses that affect the mind. Suffering from hypoxia (an amount of oxygen deprivation so great the adult mind is turned into that of a slow child’s) himself, it is tear jerking to read Krakauer’s account of how his oxygen depleted mind would not allow him to comprehend the obvious dangers looming ahead for his fellow climbers and save his friend and guide, Andy Harris.

Answers also come in the commercialization of Everett where expedition teams haul novice climbers up the mountain as long as their wallets are fat enough. Since Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to scale the mountain 43 years earlier, the previously unreachable Everett had almost become a joke to respected climbers. Mapped out by expedition teams, Everett had become exploited to the point where clients were bringing fax machines to base camp, a lama showed off a picture of himself posing with Steven Segal, and deceased climbers from failed treks shared the mountain with hundreds of depleted oxygen tanks.

Therefore, there were climbers on the mountain who had no business being there who paid an extravagant amount of money to reach the 29,028-foot summit, as if reaching the peak is something automatic when it has more do with luck and perfect conditions than actual skill and a $65,000 price tag. The question then became for expedition leaders, how do we turn around clients who are so close, have endured so much, and have paid so much money? What will turning around such high paying clients do to my company’s reputation? And sadly, the inability to make this tough decision led to the deaths of so many clients and the expedition leaders themselves.

While this is not a book that will be studied in literature classes, it is impossible not to be moved by “Into Thin Air.” It is a novel that will be enjoyed as much as Krakauer probably hated writing it.