There is very little about this book that’s not harrowing - even the climb to Base Camp sounds pretty taxing. It’s an adventure story par excellence, but more than that it’s a book about an incredibly traumatic event (the death of a dozen people during the Everest climbing season of 1996) that the author witnessed, in large part, first hand. It’s fairly rare to read something quite so close to the nerve, and I think that rawness is partly why the book is so gripping. There were parts where it was difficult to follow - mostly, I think, because I had a hard time picturing the various rock formations and things that Krakauer was describing.

It’s tempting to read this book and think of all of the various things that might have helped avert the tragedy - regulations on commercial guiding, policies about who does and who does not need to use supplemental oxygen above so many meters of elevation, etc. - but I can’t pretend to know enough to really say. And in any case - it’s unclear whether those regulations would be properly enforced, whether at normal elevation or on the mountain itself. (Of course - for all I know additional regulations have indeed been put into place, it’s been nearly twenty years now.) In particular it’s difficult to say who is correct, in the rather harsh debate about guiding policies, between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukreev (though Krakauer does sound like the more scrupulous of the two) - on the one hand I’m sympathetic to Krakauer’s point of view, naturally, and on the other I imagine that a highly experienced guide like Boukreev probably knew what he was doing. (And Boukreev’s heroic, and effective, deeds on the mountain deserve a lot of credit.)

In many ways this is a book about life at the extremes: Everest is a frighteningly punishing environment, the people who try to climb it tend to be quite a bit more ambitious and driven then your average person, and the institutional apparatus that supports Everest climbing is an essentially slap-dash collection of commercial expeditions with little oversight. Which, of course, is what makes the whole story so fascinating.