Wow. Just wow.

Full Review:

So John Oliver recently had a segment on the crush of tourists, basically, at Mount Everest these days. 11 people have already died trying to summit Everest, mostly, it seems, due to the traffic jam at the summit, if you can believe it! The count is up to 12 people have died so far this year, the third most ever.

So I just happened to come across the paperback version of Krakauer's classic first person adventure tale of climbing Everest himself, in 1996. During this climb, 8 people died, including 4 in Krakauer's guided party. He wrote a widely read Outside magazine article (that's who sent him in the first place) and then expanded upon it for this book. I started reading it on a lark and damn if I just couldn't put it down.

A pretty seasoned climber himself, his descriptions of actually ascending Everest just don't make it sound like very much fun. He is pretty brutal on himself, and in trying to dissect just what went wrong, especially for the people who died around him. And his descriptions of the survival of a couple of the members of the party is nothing less than miraculous.

I tell you, I could literally not put this book down once I got started. He does a fantastic job of describing the allure of mountain climbing in general and summitting Everest in specific. He doesn't spare the awful details of the various kinds of altitude sickness, the remarkable killing cold and the capricious weather. You can almost understand his longing. Not really, but he tries!

It made me think of when I climbed Uluru (Ayer's Rock) during our visit to Australia. The natives don't really want you to do it, but allow it because of the almighty dollar. And after I did it, I immediately regretted it. It just seems like such a "white person's" quest, to "conquer" the mountain and for what? I still wish I could have resisted the siren call of climbing the Rock and instead took the tour around the base of it offered by the Aboriginal tribe there.

Although Krakauer never quite reaches this point, he does mention how the locals are ambivalent about the climbing and often invoke the gods and spirits to explain things. There was nothing good about 1996, although Krakauer and a few others did make it to the top. But he blames the leaders of the expeditions for pushing up the mountain when they should have called it off and others (documented by Krakauer actually) blame the presence of Krakauer, a journalist writing about the climb, for the unnecessary bravado, as the "good press" could really help the adventure companies.

This book literally kept me awake at night. I would finally force myself to close the book and turn off the light, but my mind would continue racing with the challenges, stresses, weather, tragedy and everything else swirling at the top of the world. I would just try to imagine myself in those situations and I just could never picture it. An unbelievable portrait and one I wonder if he could update it with today's conditions, over 20 years after the original tragedy.