Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer
Summary
Jon Krakauer, a journalist and experienced climber, joins a guided commercial expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in May 1996, assigned by Outside magazine to report on the mountain's new accessibility to paying amateurs but choosing, once there, to try for the summit himself rather than only observe. He climbs with Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants team, one of several commercial groups on the mountain that season alongside Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness, and reaches the top on May 10 before a storm closes in during the descent, trapping climbers from multiple expeditions above camp in whiteout conditions and subzero cold. Eight people die in the disaster the book recounts, including Hall, who Krakauer describes speaking by radio to his pregnant wife from a ledge no one could reach him from before he died there, and Fischer. Krakauer had passed client Beck Weathers on the descent, half blind and waiting for a guide, and Weathers declined his offer of help; the next morning a rescue party found Weathers collapsed in the snow, judged him beyond saving and left him, and Weathers regained consciousness hours later, walked into camp on his own, and survived with frostbite that cost him his right forearm, the fingers and thumb of his left hand, his nose and parts of both feet, a recovery Krakauer treats as the single fact in the book that most complicates his own account of who could and could not have been saved. Krakauer spends much of the narrative examining his own choices and omissions on summit day, including a separate, mistaken belief that a different descending climber he passed was safe, as carefully and unsparingly as he examines anyone else's.
It moves at the pace of a thriller even though most readers already know the outcome, Krakauer's own guilt and self scrutiny giving the account an intimacy a more detached disaster narrative would lack; it reads as an argument, made through the accumulation of specific, damning detail, that commercial competition between rival guiding companies eroded the caution that had kept earlier, more experienced expeditions alive.
Historical Context & Significance
Villard published Into Thin Air in 1997, and it was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, one of the rare mountaineering narratives to reach that level of literary recognition; it topped the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Its most serious criticism came from inside the climbing world rather than from literary critics. Kazakh guide Anatoli Boukreev, whose early descent from the summit and later solo rescue efforts during the storm Krakauer questioned even while crediting them, responded with his own 1997 book, The Climb, disputing Krakauer's account, and the photographer Galen Rowell publicly accused Krakauer of undervaluing Boukreev's rescues.
Krakauer added a lengthy postscript to the 1999 paperback addressing the Boukreev dispute directly rather than revising his original account, and the disagreement has followed the book since as a genuine, still unresolved argument between participants rather than a settled record. A 1997 television movie and Baltasar Kormakur's 2015 film Everest have each retold the same disaster without settling whose version of that descent was right.