Home > Travel > Adventure > Into Thin Air

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

List Price: $14.95

Save 10.0%

You Pay: $13.46

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10,1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds... Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed Outside journalist and author of the bestselling Into the Wild. Taking the reader step by step from Katmandu to the mountain's deadly pinnacle, Krakauer has his readers shaking on the edge of their seat. Beyond the terrors of this account, however, he also peers deeply into the myth of the world's tallest mountain. What is is about Everest that has compelled so many poeple--including himself--to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense? Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer's eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.

Editorial Reviews

What set out to be a magazine article on top-of-the-line tours that promise safe ascents of Mt. Everest to amateur climbers has become a gripping story of a 1996 expedition gone awry and of the ensuing disaster that killed two top guides, a sherpa and several clients. "Climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain," writes Krakauer (Into the Wild). "And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering... most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace." High-altitude climbers are an eccentric breed�Olympian idealists, dreamers, consummate sportsmen, egomaniacs and thrill-seekers. Excerpts from the writings of several of the best-known of them, including Sir Edmund Hillary, kick off Krakauer's intense reports on each leg of the ill-fated expedition. His own descriptions of the splendid landscape are exhilarating. Survival on Mt. Everest in the "Dead Zone" above 25,000 feet demands incredible self-reliance, responsible guides, supplemental oxygen and ideal weather conditions. The margin of error is nil and marketplace priorities can lead to disaster; and so Krakauer criticizes the commercialization of mountaineering. But while his reports of guides' bad judgments are disturbing, they evoke in him and in the reader more compassion than wrath, for, in the Dead Zone, experts lose their wits nearly as easily as novices. The intensity of the tragedy is haunting, and Krakauer's graphic writing drives it home: one survivor's face "was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks." On the sacred mountain Sagarmatha, the Nepalese name for Everest, the frozen corpses of fallen climbers spot the windswept routes; they will never be buried, but in this superb adventure tale they have found a fitting monument. Author tour. (May) -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jon Krakauer

Mountain climber and writer Jon Krakauer was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1954. He worked as a carpenter and fisherman and wrote articles on mountain climbing throughout the latter half of the 1970s. By 1980, he wrote regularly for Outside magazine and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Playboy and Rolling Stone. Krakauer wrote In the Wild, but is best known for Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. 030

Customer Reviews

  • 5 stars out of 5Unbelievable true story.

    Posted April 05, 2009 by JHanna, Toronto, Canada

    John Krakauer writes so well that readers can't help but feel they're right there with him on the mountain. This recount of one of the most disastrous climbs of Mt. Everest provides great insight into the sport of mountaineering. The reader is taken through the steps that climbers go through in order to prepare them to tackle the tallest mountain in the world. One really gets a sense of the science and 'luck" factors that climbers are exposed to in their desire to reach the top .

    Months are taken to prepare to climb Everest and only when conditions on the mountain are safe; are climbers able to try and attempt to make the summit. Making the summit is the ultimate goal and not every expedition ends in a successful summit experience. Clients pay tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest so, when you run a climbing business, there's incredible pressure to make sure your clients get to the top. This push for the top was the fatal flaw in 1999.

    "Into Thin Air" is quite a fantastic first hand account of what happened, what went wrong and why so many perished. The story is also one of incredible courage strength and endurance. For those who survived it was a miracle, for those who perished, a shame.

Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

2.96 MB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9780679462712

Awards

  • American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) Award
  • American Library Association Notable Books
  • Black-Eyed Susan Book Award
  • Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award
  • Garden State Teen Book Award
  • Los Angeles Times Book Prizes
  • National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • New York Times Editors' Choice
  • Pacific Northwest Bookseller Awards
  • Pulitzer Prize
  • School Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

In March 1996, Outside Magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I'd descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions' deaths.

The Outside piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock. At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us had witnessed high on the mountain, and one of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time, what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the Outside article went to press, I discovered that a few of the details I'd reported were in error. Most were minor inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my blunders was in no sense minor, and it had a devastating impact on the friends and family of one of the victims.