Life is stranger than fiction — that’s what reading “Into Thin Air” made me feel.
The story began when Jon Krakauer was assigned by Outside magazine to write an article about the commercialization of Mount Everest expeditions. Outside paid $65,000 to enter him into an expedition to climb Everest in 1996. Little did he know that he was stepping into a disaster that would take the lives of eight people.
The book is a personal account of the author’s experience with the disaster. Through the story, I learned a brief history of Everest, who climbed it first, how exactly the Everest expedition works, what were its main challenges (lack of oxygen and cold), and the role of Sherpas in handling logistics and blazing out the route for people to follow. Although these historical and mechanical parts of the story were informational, the non-mechanical parts, the climbers, gave the story life.
Why were more than 30+ people climbing the mountain in the first place? Each had their own reasons: one who wanted to write an article, one who wanted to promote his expedition business, one who rivaled the previous, one who live-blogged their journey (yup, an influencer in 1996), one who climbed alone, one who wanted to vanquish their reputation for clumsiness, and a few more. The next time I see a movie with random people gathering to go on an adventure, I won’t doubt its reality anymore. It happens.
Everyone is a protagonist in life, and I found myself thinking about what each of them was going through. People make mistakes at 8000 meters above sea level with 1/3rd of oxygen going to your brain. After finishing the book, I spent quite some time Googling about them to see if there were any repercussions for their actions. This is the advantage of reading a non-fiction memoir, you can see how the characters are doing beyond the book.
Some of the characters have criticized the author of the book. You can’t write a book truthfully without hurting people’s feelings. They shot back with their accounts of the incident and now we have multiple versions. What really happened on top of the mountain? There is only one truth, but the perception of it varies.