Book: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Into Thin Air is a personal account of a Mount Everest disaster where 12 people were killed in one climbing season in 1996. The author, Jon Krakauer, also wrote Into the Wild which I wrote about a while ago. I recommended Into the Wild. I also recommend Into Thin Air. When I read Into the Wild, Krakauer mentioned that he wanted to write Christopher McCandless's story because he saw his shadow in McCandless. He also mentioned that he himself almost got killed on Mt. Everest. I didn't know about the disaster when I read Into the Wild, but I sort of kept that in mind.

Into Thin Air, like Into the Wild, isn't the happiest book to read. This book was written half a year after the disaster, when Krakauer hasn't quite gotten past the post-traumatic effects of his own near death experience and the witnessing of the deaths of his teammates on Mount Everest. I can't say how accurate the book was, for some of the descriptions and analyses go to people who didn't make it down Mt. Everest. But if read as a novel, while bearing in mind that it's a true story, the book does give you the chill and make you want to find out what happened to everyone. It wasn't easy to put down even between chapters.

I would recommend this book to everyone.