Into Thin Air
A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer In 1996, Jon Krakauer, sponsored by
Outside magazine, climbed Mt. Everest with a guide. Mt. Everest always has bad weather. Because the weather is best around early May, many of the guided expeditions choose that time for their summit climb. In 1996, many tours were on Everest, and they were not getting along well. Although they met and agreed that only two groups would climb on the 10th of May, most of the groups climbed then. Everest had a bad storm that day. Twelve people died climbing Everest in May 1996.
Krakauer wrote this book in part to relieve the deaths of the many people he had gotten to know while climbing Everest. He talks about everything remotely relevant to the climb. Reading this book provides extensive information about Everest and about climbing. It is also about the finances of Tibet, about Sherpas, and about the reasons that people climb in dangerous situations. Krakauer would like the deaths to have meaning, to be at the very least a warning, but more people continue to climb and die on Everest.
I usually do not consider vocabulary while I read, unless the book has an unusual one, but I read this book in order to provide definitions for difficult words for a friend who is required to read it. The vocabulary is far above what most high schoolers know or understand. Further, many of the words are not in the American Heritage dictionary, because Krakauer uses a lot of Brittish slang. He also uses a lot of metaphor and nonstandard usages of words. Some prior knowledge of mountaineering would probably also be useful in reading the book.
Pictures and diagrams vary between editions of the book.
Cautionary reading.
