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Completed	28 January 2008
Title	Into Thin Air
Author	Jon Krakauer
Published	1998
Quote	"I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care."
Review	Krakauer was sponsored by a magazine to climb Mount Everest. He was under obligation to write an article about his experiences. He reached the summit on May 10, 1996, which was the deadliest day on Everest. A sudden storm moved in, climbers were trapped on the mountain, mistakes were made, people died. If you play with fire, you get burned. If you juggle knives, you may get cut. If you climb Mount Everest, you may not make it down alive. It all goes with the territory. Climbers know what they're signing up for. Climbers are focused like that. I have no problem with tunnel vision. I respect people who have a goal and go about attaining it. I honor motivated and ambitious people. What I don't honor, though, is achievement at any price. So what if you make it to the top of Everest but at the expense of your own self-respect? How can you live with yourself after that? I admit, I did not finish reading Into Thin Air. I had to close the book. I had to put it away. The actions and inactions of Krakauer and his climbing mates made me thoroughly sick. Climbers are notorious for being self-centered. How else could they focus so narrowly on their climbing ambitions? I know this because I know climbers. I love the mountains and I spent a whole month once in Nepal, trekking through the Himalayas. On Everest, that single-minded nature is taken to the nth degree. Each man is on his own. No one helps the other. They are each focused on summitting, and once attained, they are focused on a safe withdrawal down the mountain. After all, they've each paid about $50,000 for the privilege of joining a "team" for the chance to make it to the top. The images of sick and very slowly dying climbers, sitting in the snow on the slope and simply left for dead, with healthy climbers just walking on by, well, it just makes me sick. How could you just walk on by a dying person like that? What kind of self-centered sicko are you? As I've said before, there's something about Krakauer that rubs me the wrong way.

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