It was written well got to the point and did just enough into each life to be interesting not boring.

“Into Thin Air” is Jon Krakauer’s best-selling memoir of the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy. For the most part, I think it is a very well written and engrossing book. It tells the story of Krakauer’s experiences as part of the ill-fated commercial expedition to Mount Everest in May 1996. At that time, Krakauer was a journalist writing for Outside magazine. His employers had assigned him to write a story about the commercialization of climbing Mount Everest. In order to write his story, Krakauer, who was already an experienced mountaineer, would join the Adventure Consultants team in climbing Everest, and then write about his experiences afterward. (New Zealander Rob Hall, who was widely regarded as the best commercial guide in the business, led Adventure Consultants.) Krakauer admits writing “Into Thin Air” in order to explain the Everest tragedy from his perspective. He also admits that he was still very emotional about his experiences while he was writing both his 17.000 word article for Outside magazine and his book. In his book’s introduction, he assures readers that he did the best he could to get his facts correct, not just by relying on his memory of events, but by interviewing as many of the expeditions’ other members as possible. Krakauer writes with great precision and detail when describing the events of May 9-12, 1996. As I read each page, I found myself transported to the Everest base camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the South Col, and into the "Death Zone." I could picture the towering seracs and bottomless crevasses of the icefall, the windswept barrenness of the South Col, and the sun-scalded but frigid summit. As the storm struck with its savage ferocity, I could feel the terror, despair, and gritty determination of each mountaineer still trapped high on storm-ravaged Everest. The deaths of Krakauer’s fellow mountaineers were heartbreaking, and the stories of those who survived were inspiring. If Krakauer had left his story right there, it would have been an outstanding book about death and survival on Everest. However, Krakauer felt the need to try to explain why the tragedy occurred, and he did so by heaping blame on certain individuals for what happened. He is especially scathing in his criticisms of Mountain Madness guide Anatoli Boukreev and client Sandy Hill Pittman. To his credit, he also severely chastises himself for his own failures to help others when he was called upon to do so. When I finished “Into Thin Air,” I was left wondering: what was the point of publicly censuring others for their faults, foibles, and ambitions? Mistakes were made, yes; but would those mistakes have cost anyone their lives or their limbs if there had been no storm..? No one will ever know, but I think it is doubtful. Despite my lingering questions about “Into Thin Air,” I still think it’s an excellent book that tells an important story about the tragedy on Mount Everest. Highly recommended. (4½ Stars ^ 5)

into thin air was a captivating book that immersed me in the tragedy and made me feel sentimental to the people lost. It uses an excellent combination of ethos and pathos with the first hand anecdote of Jon Krauker and his experience and the way he goes into deep detail of the events. The emotional ties and bonds that Jon has affects the reader greatly as if the memoir was a long lost memory of the reader. You feel the pain of the people and the pain of jon not only physically but mentally and emotionally with his descriptive and eloquent wording. If i had the opportunity to forget the second half of this book and read it again i would. I recommend this book to all who are interested not only in adventure but those interested in morality and the heartfelt struggles of a man just trying to survive watching his chances slip by him.

Almost twenty years ago, journalist Jon Krakauer joined a guided expedition to the top of Mount Everest, led by accomplished high-altitude climber and guide Rob Hall. Ostensibly on assignment to write a magazine piece on the increasing commercialization of Everest, as outfits like Hall's made it possible for climbers with more disposable income than actual mountaineering experience to have a go at the summit, Krakauer knew this might be his only chance to fulfill his own boyhood dream by standing atop the highest mountain on earth. An enthusiastic climber since childhood - though with no experience whatsoever at very high altitudes - he was one of the most technically proficient clients on Hall's team, and on May 10, 1996, he made it to the summit. On the way back down the mountain, however, Hall's group was one of several expeditions caught up suddenly in a violent snowstorm. Krakauer, farther down the mountain than most of his teammates when the storm hit, made it safely back to the tents before he collapsed in exhaustion. He woke to discover that triumph had given way to terror and tragedy: several guides and clients, including Hall, were still out there in the storm, their bodies becoming increasingly vulnerable to the subzero temperatures as their supplemental oxygen supplies dwindled. "By the time I'd descended to Base Camp," Krakauer reflects in the Introduction, "nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out." "Into Thin Air," written within six months of Krakauer's return from Everest, is the product of his attempts to process exactly what happened up there, how things could go so very wrong and so many very experienced climbers, some of whom had summitted Everest several times before, could have lost their lives: "I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn't, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity's immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish." Thanks perhaps to the years spent honing his craft as a writer and his discipline as a journalist with deadlines to meet, Krakauer succeeds brilliantly in what he has set out to do. His account is nowhere rushed, hysterical, or lacking in polish; rather, it's a well-told story, supported by carefully researched background and dozens of interviews with other participants in the events, and Krakauer is so much in control of his narrative that it comes almost as a shock how much of a genuine emotional wallop it packs. Perhaps only a man who stood on the summit of Everest after years of dreaming, only to regret afterwards that he'd ever gone, could tell this story the way Krakauer does, neither glossing over the dangers of the mountain or the waste of good human lives, nor denying the challenge it poses the human spirit simply by being the highest spot on the earth's surface, simply, in the words of a man who died on Everest decades before, "because it is there." "Into Thin Air" is a thrilling, if sobering, tale of adventure. Let's be honest, reading a book like this is as close as most of us are ever going to get to climbing the great mountain - and Krakauer describes so well the challenges of the terrain, the moments of astonishing beauty, the plodding determination that carries the exhausted body ever onward, the effects of high altitude on the body and mind, that our vicarious ascent in his company is thoroughly satisfying. He brings his fellow climbers alive for us, too, in brief but vivid verbal portraits. We are told not only of their mountaineering prowess, but their determination, their amiability, their families, their human faults and foibles. Even though we've known pretty much all along who dies and who lives (the book is dedicated to the memory of those who died, and a photograph of the mountain between the introduction and first chapter is labeled with a map of their route indicating where major events took place, including several deaths), by the time the storm sweeps in we've come to care about these people, to hope without hope, to mourn their deaths, to celebrate every time a survivor makes it to safety. Some readers have labeled Krakauer arrogant and accused him of placing blame on everyone but himself, but I didn't find this to be the case. He comes down against the practice of guides leading commercial expeditions of clients without the skills or experience to make the climb without constant hand-holding, but he acknowledges that he himself didn't rightly belong there, and has nothing but praise for the skills of Rob Hall and the other guides he knew personally. He doesn't hesitate to point out errors of judgment that might have facilitated or compounded the perils of the situation, but it's more in the nature of pointing out the fallibility of human nature and the general unreliability of the human brain in a state of hypoxia (which, 8000 meters above sea level, supplemental oxygen can only partially mitigate) than pointing fingers or placing blame. There are no villains (except perhaps Ian Woodall, literally the only one of dozens of people he met on Everest of whom Krakauer had nothing good to say whatsoever, who for no apparent reason denied the use of his radio to help maintain contact with survivors and coordinate rescue attempts), but plenty of heroes: men and women who risked their lives venturing exhausted into a storm to rescue others, who held their own grief at bay to console the dying, who handed over their own precious bottles of oxygen to those in greater need, who calmly coordinated communications and rescue efforts during a time of crisis, or who simply managed to keep breathing when it would have been so much easier and less painful to fall asleep forever in the snow. That some of these fine, heroic men and women made the occasional mistake or bad decision says more about the risky nature of their undertaking than about them as individuals. Krakauer doesn't exempt himself from folly or fallibility, either, and in fact he's far harder on himself than he is on any of the others who were with him on the summit that day, living or dead. And granted that the fortitude, endurance, determination, and self-confidence necessary to tackle Everest tend to come hand-in-hand with a certain swagger and cockiness, Krakauer doesn't come across as particularly arrogant. This is a man who lets his readers see him, in the last chapter, broken by grief and survivor's guilt, lying across a bed naked and high on cannabis, with thick sobs "erupting out of my nose and mouth in a flood of snot." There's enough controversy surrounding the events on Everest in 1996, and particularly Krakauer's accounting of them, that readers who truly wish to understand what happened on the mountain that sad day probably shouldn't rely on this book alone. Fortunately, a number of other books on the subject exist, including at least four other memoirs by survivors of the disaster. "Into Thin Air," however, remains in any case a good place to start - and a thrilling, if ultimately haunting, read.

Krakauer has written a wonderful book that makes mountaineering easy to understand for the average person. I finished this book in 3 days, as it was super engaging and I could not put it down. The way he recounts the story of the 1996 Everest disaster is done in a way that made it easy for me to put myself in his shoes. I bought a used copy and it was in great shape. Have recommended this book to many people because I enjoyed it so much.