Recommendations from our site
“Jon Krakauer is a phenomenal writer. It’s about a climbing season when the ascending teams made an avalanche of mistakes. Despite a dire forecast, out of pure hubris, many climbers cast all cautions and rules about when to return aside. Some were stranded at the top of Everest. But when the will to survive set in, they pulled together to save themselves and others. It reminds me that the will to live can have a clarifying effect in many murky situations.” Read more...
This is the book that really got me going on Everest literature as a grownup. It’s highly readable with an ‘angle.’ Basically, there were too may inexperienced mountaineers on the mountain, in fact too many people period. There was a huge traffic jam at the Hillary Step near the summit and this, among other things, contributed to the disaster. His descriptions of climbing, getting a headache from the sun in the day, feeling slightly dehydrated and yet at the same the cold, it’s all quite evocative. Oh. And the dead bodies.
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