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Into Thin Air A Personal Account of the Mt EverThe following report compares books using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
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Aftersleep Books - 2005-06-20 07:00:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.aftersleep.com () | sitemap | top |
In the climbing season of 1996, a large number of climbing parties that included numerous non-professionals attempted Everest, and a dozen of them were left in crevasses, under avalanches, or under crude cairns put up by later expeditions. For several years, these expeditions were a source of controversy, fueled by a book attacking Krakauer and by a famous New Yorker article. People, being people, always want someone to blame.
I had heard of INTO THIN AIR long before I read it and knew of the controversies. Nothing prepared me, however, for Krakauer's vivid recounting of the events of 1996. Although it gets confusing cutting back and forth between 16 expeditions on the mountain, the central fact of the difficulties faced by the climbers and by the apparently random fates that befell them comes across clearly.
At one point, Krakauer quotes Conrad's LORD JIM:
"There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention -- that indefinable something that forces it upon the mind and heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and fear, the pain of his fatigue and the longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all...."
So when I read all the morning-after pundits attempt to recast the events so that one person or another is to blame, all I can conclude is that anyone who attempts Everest has placed his life in pawn -- regardless how experienced he or she is, how strong, how well equipped, how otherwise lucky. Time and chance happen to all, and on the mountain, they happen with a vengeance.
This is superlative reading, and I recommend it to all without qualification.