(by Jon Krakauer)<\/p>\n
Disaster\/survival nonfiction is not generally my genre—in fact, I think this book may be the only one of its sort that I’ve ever read. This is an account of a 1996 guided expedition to climb Mount Everest that the author was on that ended in tragedy, with multiple people dying on the mountain during and after a “rogue storm”, as well as for other reasons. Krakauer starts towards the end, when he reaches the summit and finds a traffic jam behind him where he needs to descend, which is not great, especially given that he’s low on oxygen and “hadn’t slept in fifty-seven hours.” He then loops back to give the reader a summary of early attempts to climb Everest (culminating in the 1953 summit by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay) and also talks about later Everest climbs (including Dick Bass’s 1985 guided ascent, which he points to as the start of a boom in commercial guided expeditions). He also talks a bit about his own climbing background before coming back to the start of the 1996 trip and proceeding mostly chronologically from there.<\/p>\n
I found this very readable, if also pretty stressful: there are a lot of ways to die on Everest, and this book touches on a lot of them, from High Altitude Pulmonary Edema to exposure to just falling off a cliff. There are some idyllic descriptions, like when Krakauer describes trekking “past glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and rhododendron, thundering waterfalls, enchanting boulder gardens, burbling streams”, en route to the village of Lobuje, but there’s also a whole lot of unpleasantness, like when Krakauer talks about the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions his group encountered en route to Base Camp. “The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on,” Krakauer writes at one point, and that misery (even before people start dying) really comes through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(by Jon Krakauer) Disaster\/survival nonfiction is not generally my genre—in fact, I think this book may be the only one of its sort that I’ve ever read. This is an account of a 1996 guided expedition to climb Mount Everest that the author was on that ended in tragedy, with multiple people dying on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13983"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14005,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13983\/revisions\/14005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}