Into Thin Air is a personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster in 1996*. Jon Krakauer dreamed of climbing Everest as a child. Climbing was his life but he decided to quite when he got married. When he got an offer at his job to write an article about climbing Everest as a first person guide, he immediately excepted. Joining an commercial expedition with Rob HallFaced with the challenge of the Everest disaster.
Though this is a nonfiction book it is written like a fiction adventure book. I highly recommend it. There is lots of cursing in this book, but I think anyone in our class can read it and should.
*Disaster struck on May 10, 1996 as four different expeditions all attempted to reach the summit. Guide Anatoli Boukreev took his team to the top early in the day, with Rob Hall and Scott Fischer’s teamclose behind. When a powerful storm came up suddenly, the climbers were trapped in a precarious position. Even strong and experienced climbers such as Hall and Fischer, both Everest veterans, could only struggle short distances down the peak. Boukreev descended to the nearest camp without his clients, ostensibly to be in a better position to rescue them. (In his book, Krakauer was highly critical of this move. Boukreev countered Krakauer’s version of the story with his own in The Climb, published in 1997.)
Hall and Fischer stayed with their clients but the continuing storm made everyone vulnerable to death as oxygen supplies ran out. Although technology allowed Rob Hall to talk to his wife in New Zealand by satellite phone, there was nothing that could be done to save eight of the climbers, including both Hall and Fischer, who could not make it back to camp. - http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/death-on-mount-everest
No comments:
Post a Comment