Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
My rating: 3/5 cats
RELEASE THE KRAKAUER!!!!
seriously, it is time to just raze everest and be done with it already. i mean, it’s big and impressive but it is just taking up all this room and killing people so why do we even need it anymore?? can’t we just get over it? really, i think it has reached its peak and is all downhill from here.
shameless punning aside.
so this started out as an article that KRAKAUER was asked to write for outside magazine about the commercialization of everest. it should embarrass us that something that costs 75,000 dollars to even attempt even has the potential to become “commercialized.” (for example—i just balked at shelling out $7.17 for the sandwich i am eating. and like everest, it is kind of crappy) how misplaced is our spending? for fifty bucks a toe, i will chop yours right off and you can pretend you climbed everest and had a gay old time. everyone wins! but there are purists who think that there was golden age of everest and everything since then has just been compromised and now everest is a trash heap full of inconvenient dead bodies and empty oxygen bottles and really just anyone can climb everest so it isn’t even a challenge anymore…
THAT IS THE KIND OF ATTITUDE THAT EVEREST WILL FUCKING KILL YOU FOR HAVING!!!
do not climb everest—it is a trap!!
when i was making this year’s thanksgiving meal, i decided to have a little fun and incorporate things i learned from everest into the prep. because i had soooo many brussels sprouts to prepare, as well as parsnips, carrots, beets, sweet and regular potatoes, turnips, onions, cauliflower, etc. it was a lot of peeling. and i tried to see how many i could peel while holding my breath, and what that did to my motor skills. all i learned is that i really like to breathe and any activity in which i cannot breathe is not for me. by the end, i was weeping, “KRAKAUER wouldn’t give up!! he would chop allllll the brussels sprouts!!!”
but from everything i have read of everest (note: two books) it is THE WORST. all of the reaching of the summit which should be time for celebration is always so anticlimactic. you can’t stay up there very long because humans need to breathe and all; there is no fireplace and hot cocoa like at the top of the viennese alps, and then there is the small matter of DESCENDING!! all that bullshit and putting-up-with for ten seconds of “experience”?? i gave all that up in high school, thank you very much.
oh shit—i have class now. i will “review” more later…
okay, so i went to class. i learned some stuff. and i don’t have much more to say about this. it is not as action-packed as Peak, and a lot of it reads like KRAKAUER working through his personal demons and dealing with his culpability, but it is still interesting. i still think everest is unnecessary—it is like a hot fourteen year old—who needs that kind of temptation, right? oh, and also, this:
seriously. everest: who needs it?
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