Book a Month Challenge: August

August's (yeah I know it's been September for 10 days now) Book a Month theme was "cold." I read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Into Thin Air recounts Krakauer's experience's as part of a climbing expedition that attempted to summit Everest in the spring of 1996. Krakauer has clean, crisp writing style that is both straight forward and engaging. The book starts starts at the end of the expedition; Krakauer recounts reaching the summit, and gives a brief, vivid, glimpse of the complete mental and physical exhaustion he experienced by the time he reached the summit. In these first pages, the reader also meets the members of Krakauer's expedition group and we learn immediately that the expedition ends in terrible tragedy when three of the members of the expedition team, including its leader, and five other climbers die that day after a storm with hurricane force winds traps 17 people overnight on the mountain without shelter. Krakauer then leads the reader through the history of climbing Everest as well as some of the extraordinary preparation for a climb of this magnitude. His story moves gracefully to the present expedition and he carefully examines each of the factors--known and speculated--that contributed to the disaster of summit day. The book was fascinating not just for the train-wreck aspect, but also for its account of the enormous physical difficulties involved in summitting Everest. You hear "29,000 feet" and think, yeah that's high, but Krakauer's account of altitude acclimatization brings home just what an extraordinary feat it is to survive at that altitude. He reminds the reader that a person who was picked up in say, Los Angeles, and dropped on the summit of Everest without acclimatization would immediately pass out and then die soon after. I think that Krakauer's account of his own role in the tragedy was insightful and honest and that's part of what made this book so compelling. Krakauer admits at one point in the book that having a journalist on the expedition might have been not only unfair to the other members of his team--they weren't expecting to have their every quirk exposed for posterity when they signed up for the expedition--but might have, on some level, also pressured the expedition leader to have get all of his members to the summit or at least prompted some poor decisions. Krakauer's expedition team was on the mountain during the same season that IMAX filmed its Everest documentary and the IMAX film makes a nice compliment to Krakauer's book--I'd highly recommend both.