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A review of Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

Mt. Everest mountaineering tragedy beautifully told

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

Into Thin Air I usually don’t like dramatic adventure stories because they’re often poorly written. If I don’t get a strong sense of perspective right from the start, if clichés and banalities crop up in the first pages, I give up. For me, there’s no plot worth reading if the writing doesn’t work.

I was absolutely stunned by "Into Thin Air", picked up in Seattle before heading into the Canadian Rockies. For reasons of family history, I’m fascinated with the look and feel of mountains. Most especially the Himalayas, where I spent a few days ten years ago. If there’s been one earthshaking adventure I’d like to undertake in my lifetime, it’s a trek into the mountains of Nepal.

Krakauer’s story of a disastrous trek up the South Face of Mt. Everest in 1996 is not sensationalist journalism along the lines of "I survived the terrible plane crash by eating the guy who sat next to me." Nor is it a stirring ode to the power of the mountain. It’s a story of humans and their screwed-up reasons for carrying out impossible feats.

Real mountain-obsessed individuals evince an unreasonable drive: "at just ninety-one pounds, her sparrowlike proportions disguised a formidable resolve; to an astounding degree, Yasuko had been propelled up the mountain by the unwavering intensity of her desire." The typical personality of climber guides is explored as a kind of memorial to the hardy, ambitious, driven individuals who died on that terrible May night. "When you’re guiding you don’t get to do the climbs you necessarily most want to do; the challenge comes from getting clients up and down, which is a different sort of satisfaction. But it’s a more sustainable career than endlessly chasing after sponsorships."

We’ve heard of altitude sickness. All trekkers are subject to it at these heights, and it becomes tremendously clear how uncomfortable and unpleasant it can be. "At 29,028 feet up in the troposphere, so little oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired."

Krakauer has read all the extant literature on the mountain, including the classics from many decades ago, and trenchant quotations at the beginning of each chapter serve to capture in words the hold Everest has over people. The history of westerners’ relationship with the mountain is interspersed with the descriptive passages in the tautly exciting narrative.

To my own amazement, this book helped me shake the dream of undertaking a trek in the Himalayas. It must have sunk in to me as a part of the great collective unconsciousness – wow, that must be such an intoxicating thing to do. This is what ultimately cured me: "People who don’t climb mountains – the great majority of humankind, that is to say – tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills. ... In fact, the ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on ... And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace." Reading about it ends up being enough for this reviewer.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Into Thin Air

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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