I’ll never forget the first time I read Into Thin Air. It was about 10 years ago, and I held my breath for most of the second half. Even today, after reading it probably four or five times, it’s an incredibly exciting experience that is exactly what reading is supposed to be about–taking you places you’ll never be able to go yourself. This time, after finishing it, I decided to read The Climb for the first time. Both books are about the same thing: the […]
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
Jon Krakauer has a way of covering his subjects where he extends such dignity to the topic and the people involved, that it makes for such compelling, empathetic reading. Like with Into Thin Air, I was a bit young to grasp the gravity of these accounts of people succumbing to the perils of nature. The most that I had heard about either case was noises like “Of course it’s a tragedy, but what do people expect when they are underprepared/he was some kind of idiot […]
Believe women.
There was no way this was going to be an easy read; listening to it on audiobook was downright chilling. I’ve gotta hand it to Krakauer for treating this topic and these women with the consideration and respect they deserve. This book is meticulously researched, and Krakauer’s forthright prose style works tremendously well when examining the testimony and transcripts that make up the evidence in the presented cases. Krakauer himself must needs very little editorializing to get the point across, because the documents speak for […]
A gripping tale of the Everest disaster
I distinctly remember when the Everest disaster of 1996 took place. The newspapers covered the drama that unfolded over the days and weeks, and when Reader’s Digest published an excerpt of Into Thin Air, I devoured it. I have never been one for outdoorsy activities, and absolutely was not a climber. Yet there’s something about the way Jon Krakauer writes that makes you feel like you are right in the midst of the disaster. He connects you to the individuals involved, he tells their stories, […]
I now walk into the wild
Into the Wild is a pretty well known non-fiction book that has been covered several times on CBR. It’s the fatal story of Chris McCandless/ Alexander Sumpertramp ‘s journey into the Alaskan bush. He is under-prepared and a few small mistakes lead to his untimely death. Jon Krakauer, a journalist, wrote the original article detailing the recovery of McCandless’ body; Into the Wild is his follow up. Chris graduated college and vaguely implied to his parents his intentions to go to law school- instead he […]
“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”
As in Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Krakauer starts with one case — in this book, the brutal murders of Brenda & Erica Lafferty — and expands from there to give the reader a full understanding of Mormonism, and its terrifying offshoot, the fundamental Mormons responsible for this violence and so much more. “As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than […]