Reddit Reddit reviews Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

We found 24 Reddit comments about Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Author: Jon KrakauerISBN: 9780385494786
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24 Reddit comments about Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster:

u/LeonProfessional · 272 pointsr/pics

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer

A fantastic book, I've reread it a few times. Jon Krakauer does a great job telling this story, and he talks about the kind of things you don't normally hear about Everest, just like what you're seeing in OP's image.

u/[deleted] · 8 pointsr/books

I understand what you're saying. Non-fiction books can oftentimes be boring. However, there are some excellent non-fiction books that are about adventure, exciting stories, and suspenseful plots. Fiction is great, and I love a good make-believe story, but I think there's something special you get when you read books that are about real people, real events, and real outcomes. Don't ever use your age as a crutch. You'll have a much better time in life if you push your boundaries a little.

That being said, here are some awesome, thrilling non-fiction books that you would love:

The Outpost A story about the American troops in Combat Outpost (COP) Keating in Afghanistan who were attacked by a Taliban force that outnumbered them 8:1. Two soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor for the heroic actions.

Kon-Tiki This is firsthand account about a team of researchers who sailed across the Pacific ocean in a balsam wood raft to prove that South Americans colonized Polynesia. Amazing adventure story that had huge anthropological significance.

Into Thin Air Jon Krakauer's brilliant and extremely well-written account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster (of which he was a part). Documents the deadliest season in Mt. Everest history, and focuses on the stories of the deaths of some of Everest's premier guides.

A Life in the IRA Joe Cahill was one of the first members of the modern day IRA, and his account of one of the most violent eras in European history is simply jawdropping. The author covers everything from Bloody Sunday to the death of Bobby Sands with accuracy and pathos than only a seasoned IRA leader like Cahill could convey.

There are tons more. These are some of my favorites. Enjoy fiction--there's nothing wrong with it. But don't think non-fiction is synonymous with boring.

TL;DR: The most amazing stories you'll ever read are those that actually happened.

u/cassander · 7 pointsr/books

the list does not include Into Thin Air, which makes it wrong. And please, a handmaids tale?

u/Too_many_pets · 5 pointsr/booksuggestions

Some of my favorites:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (non-fiction)

Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour (fiction)

The Purification Ceremony by Mark Sullivan (fiction)

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta (fiction)

The first two recommendations focus more on the survival aspect than the last two, but I loved all of them.

u/emenenop · 4 pointsr/ELATeachers

You say you like Dan Brown, but what's most revealing is that you like fast-paced, short chapters.

Think of it this way: what you like is short bursts of interesting information that make you say "I wonder how that's going to be important." That's what a lot of people like about Dan Brown's books. He doesn't put in anything odd or unusual that doesn't become important later on. That's part of his formula.

You also like a narrative, or story, with your non-fiction, I'm betting. I'm going to go out on a limb here (and correct me if I'm wrong), but I'm willing to bet the books you're reading about mountains have titles like "Into Thin Air" and "Dark Summit". I doubt you're reading "Tourism and Environment in the Mount Everest Region".

If my guesses are correct, then my advice is to approach the way you have to read in the way you like to read. It's not easy, and it's only a beginning to scaffolding yourself to the level of rigor that you NEED to read at.

If you can, create a narrative for yourself for when you have to read textbook material. No one needs to know. You're Langdon's assistant on this particular mystery. He's got to go talk to the great-GREAT descendant of Hieronymous Bosch. He's left you with a chemistry book and said that the descendant is willing to sell you a completely unknown-til-now Bosch painting for one dollar per atomic weight of gold in the painting. In twenty minutes, he needs you to call and tell him whether it's worth it or not. So, what is the atomic weight of gold, and is it worth a dollar? That's complete nonsense, but you see what I mean?

Another thing you might do is cut your text reading down to what you know you will process. You'll have to change your expectations of reading page after page and processing it all. Mark off stopping points of 3-4 paragraphs and summarize in notes, then progress to 5-7 and summarize, then 8-10. You are not a natural reader of extended text and haven't been trained to do so. You're going to have to train yourself, like you would with a fitness or diet routine, or as a beginner mountain climber.

u/WebbieVanderquack · 4 pointsr/news

I know literally nothing about Everest, and have never gone anywhere you can't plug in a hairdryer, but I've read a few books about climbing, and I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near that simple. Mountains aren't perfect triangles. You have to climb up and down and up and down, and sometimes you start climbing down and realize you're facing a crevasse and you have to go back up, or you have to spend days scrambling across a field of rocks.

In this case, the girlfriend fell early on and may have been too injured to walk, and within a pretty short timeframe they both would have been too weak to make it down alive. It probably made more sense to find shelter and wait for rescue.

Edit: Into Thin Air, Dead lucky, and Touching the Void are all really good reads, if you're interested. Lincoln Hall's story was made into a documentary, and the 2015 Everest movie is pretty good.

u/pantherwest · 4 pointsr/booksuggestions

One of my all time favorites is Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about a climbing season on Mount Everest where a lot of things went wrong.

I also enjoy Mary Roach - she has a great gift of being able to convey information while being really entertaining in the process. Stiff is my favorite of hers, but I also really enjoyed Packing For Mars.

u/Feed_Me_No_Lies · 3 pointsr/MorbidReality

There was an IMAX crew on the mountain on the same trip. They had to abandon their documentary to try and save people's lives. Eventually, they put the footage together and made a doc about the disaster. So, same event, two accounts.

Hereis the book: [http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/0385494785/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382961090&sr=1-1&keywords=into+thin+air]

You can get it used for one cent plus 4 bucks shipping. It was a huge seller and trust me: Is is a VERY good read. You will feel chilled to the bone reading it.

u/Gobias_Industries · 3 pointsr/todayilearned

>Are you saying that those conditions are so bad that there was no chance the guy would have survived?

Yes

>Are you saying that those conditions would have put whoever tried to help him in physical danger?

Yep

Lots of experienced climbers passed him that day, mostly sherpas who had summitted many times before. They knew there was no hope.

A real rescue attempt of a frozen person like that would have taken days to get him down to base camp. Dozens of people would be required plus all the oxygen tanks and water and food to keep all those people alive. It's very probable someone else would be injured in the attempt and that even if he was alive when they started he would be alive at the bottom.

Really, I'm not trying to be glib or dismissive, but read some books about Everest disasters like Into Thin Air or The Climb.

u/_atxeagle_ · 3 pointsr/Everest

I agree with this list of Top 10 Documentaries on Mountaineering. Not exactly on point for what you wanted. Not sure it really exists at this point.

​

I really liked Meru. If you don't mind reading here are a few books that got me into it:

​

Into Thin Air.

No Shortcuts to the Top.

The Climb.

​

Training Books:

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Training for New Alpinism

Climbing: Training for Peak Performance.

u/throwd_away8675309 · 2 pointsr/SFGiants

This last week I watched Everest about the 1996 Mt. Everest tragedy and I've been obsessed with it since.

I've watched 3 documentaries about it and currently reading/listening to Into Thin Air

Pretty haunting to be stranded at the peak of the world (29,000 feet high. For perspective, planes cruise around 33,000 feet high) where the air is so thin and lacking oxygen but you're trekking up near-vertical terrain in -10^o F temperature. Then a storm comes and you're hours from camp. You can't stop or you'll freeze to death but you can't see because everything is white.

u/kimmature · 2 pointsr/books

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I'm a fan of time-travel, and history, and I was completely sucked into it. She's got a number of books in the same universe- some comedic, some very dramatic, but The Doomsday Book is my favourite.

If you're at all interested in high fantasy, I'd recommend either Tigana or The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. You either love his prose style or hate it, but if you love it, it will definitely take you away.

If you like SF and haven't read them, I'd try either Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, or David Brin's Uplift Series (I'd skip Sundiver until later, and start with Startide Rising.)

If you're looking for more light-hearted/quirky, I'd try Christopher Moore- either Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal , or The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. If you're into a mix of horror/sf/comedy, try John Dies at the End. They're not deep, but they're fun.

Non-fiction- if you haven't read it yet, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is very difficult to put down. If you're travelling with someone who doesn't mind you looking up every few pages and saying "did you know this, this is awesome, wow-how interesting", I'd go for Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants or Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life. They're all very informative, fun, interesting books, but they're even better if you can share them while you're reading them.



u/KariQuiteContrary · 2 pointsr/books

Oh, also the Maximum Ride series! Should have thought of this one earlier. It's not really short, but it is fast-paced with plenty of action.

You could also try something like Between a Rock and a Hard Place (the book that the film 127 Hours is based on). Several of my junior boys have really gotten into Into the Wild. Into Thin Air, also by Jonathan Krakauer, might also fit the bill, if real-life survival/adventure stories would be interesting to him.

I'd also recommend Chris Crutcher as an author. He tends to write a lot of sports stories (not sure if that's something that would interest your brother), but they're entertaining, realistic, and funny. And quick reads!

u/alpinefallout · 2 pointsr/CampingandHiking

I enjoyed Ed Viesturs book: No Shortcuts to the Top, it was a self focused memoir, yet he shares his views and opinions in a way that came off genuine and down to earth. It is probably different than something you are writing since the focus of the book is entirely on something that made him very famous (First American to climb all 8000m peaks)

I like John Krakauer's books. Into Thin Air was a great firsthand account of a major disaster. It has some controversy, but like anything else firsthand accounts rely on the writers memory of events and those can change wildly from person to person.

Into the Wild is obviously another one of his more famous works. I liked it writing style and level of research, but I disliked the man the book was written about with a passion. Hardly the writers fault there though.

u/Beelzabub · 2 pointsr/sailing

Agree. The Clipper Round the World Race is the Mt. Everest of sailing, and by Mt. Everest, I mean the [Into Thin Air] (https://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/0385494785) version. An interesting article on the race: 40,000 miles of open ocean — and a boat full of rookies

u/147DegreesWest · 2 pointsr/keto

The old RK surgery had some very strange effects in high altitude climbs. "Left for Dead," is an account of a climber who had vision challenges on Mount Everest. Another account, "Into Thin Air" details the experience of another climber related to eye surgery.

Granted Rainier is not Everest, but climbers need to be mindful that some eye surgeries can cause some climbers problems at high altitudes. Certainly not all surgeries and certainly not all climbers, but it is always good to ask your eye surgeon and other climbers who have had that particular surgery before a serious climb. Rainier is a climb in its own right, but is often a prelude for this list

u/havalinaaa · 1 pointr/tipofmytongue
u/sorkle · 1 pointr/suggestmeabook

In the Heart of the Sea was excellent. I'm also a fan of similarly harrowing nonfiction. Here are a few others to check out:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is about a disaster on Everest. Lots of freezing to death in this one.

Alive by Piers Paul Read is about a plane crash in the Andes. Features both freezing to death and eating each other.

u/whiskeydreamkathleen · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon
u/entropic · 1 pointr/AskReddit

It sounds like you're off to a good start. You sound pretty close to the right height/weight ratio, so it'll probably be pretty hard to see any big weight changes even with a lot of effort. I had a lot of good luck on a bicycle, largely because running would tear my body up, so good luck to you.

There's some good (and conflicting) advice in this thread already, but working out with friends can help you stay at it. In a similar vein, I started playing pick-up basketball at a park a couple nights a week, made some friends there, and my team of 5 would expect me to be out there so we'd have a full team on those nights. That way I'd be sure to be out there since I knew if I wasn't they'd be upset. It really helped on nights where I could have easily packed it in and stayed home, any almost never did I regret actually going. Another thing you can do is train for an event with someone; maybe a mini-triathlon, half-marathon, century bicycle race.

But I actually came to answer your audiobook question. I had some good luck with This American Life (you can get all of the MP3s for free) for awhile but burned out on it a bit. Then I made myself a musical bike helmet and I'm in freakin' heaven with that thing; it's the perfect amount of split attentions for me. I like fitness cycling to adventure/survival non-fiction, I could manage to push myself since the characters had it so much worse. How can you refuse to go balls out for another 3 minute interval when you're listening to a story where someone's starving to death?

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing was my favorite of that genre, had a brilliant reader.

I also liked Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

And out of that genre, I've recently listened to Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and Moneyball by Michael Lewis and I can't stop talking about either of them.

Good luck and keep at it. I got a lot of silver-bullet advice from a lot of well-meaning friends, but what really helped was finding stuff that worked for me and then ignoring them. I'm down about 50lbs over the 16 months or so.

u/dodli · 1 pointr/booksuggestions

Into Thin Air fits your bill.

u/dakboy · 1 pointr/todayilearned

> Well, so long "buried alive," you're no longer number one on my list-of-worst-ways-to-die list.

Read The Climb and (as much as I dislike Krakauer) Into Thin Air. I read them back to back (read Into Thin Air first) and it gave me nightmares.

Both books chronicle the events that took place on Everest in May 1996. Krakauer was there to write an article or a different book; Boukreev was there as a hired guide who was using the trip to fund his next personal ascent on another peak.

I'm not sure which part it was that got to me the most; probably Rob Hall being patched through from his radio to base camp to a satellite phone to his pregnant wife in New Zealand, while he sat just below the South Summit freezing to death - as everyone on the mountain listened on their radios.

u/CiroFlexo · 1 pointr/Reformed

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - It's the memoirs of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. Despite his genius, the book is not technical in any way and instead focuses on the bizarre, outlandish, and behind-the-scenes moments of his life.

Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer's white-knuckle, first-hand account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.