Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer

Random House

I am not a fan of action adven­ture travel tales or extremes of phys­i­cal exer­tion: every­thing I know about moun­tain climb­ing I learned from Earle Birney’s long nar­ra­tive poem “David,” about two boys’ sum­mer around Banff. But once I had started Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (Random House), an account of the ill-fated 1996 Everest expe­di­tion, I couldn’t put it down until I had read all 378 pages. To quote Rex Murphy of the CBC, this is “stretch journalism” — an arti­cle expanded to book length, reportage with inter­views, quo­ta­tions, analy­sis, self-analysis and con­fes­sion. Yet the writ­ing and the visual pre­sen­ta­tion of the mate­r­ial — some of it quite tech­ni­cal — are so well done that even the lay reader whips through the 29,028-foot trek with­out skim­ming. Krakauer’s descrip­tion of the roles played in the dis­as­ter by hubris, weather, inex­pe­ri­ence, com­pe­ti­tion, per­sonal his­tory, hypoxia, the pres­ence of reporters and the abil­ity to buy the Summit, are enlarged by his mov­ing per­sonal account of survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress. This book didn’t make me want to climb a moun­tain, but it helped me under­stand those who do, and it inspired me to read again, for sheer joy, Birney’s poem about “That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains.”