Into Thin Air

After writing Friday's decidedly subpar Gambit, I made a trip to the Highland Park Barnes and Noble, thinking it'd be cheaper than any airport bookstore, needing reading material for my trip to Phoenix (feature article coming soon to a simpleprop.com website near you). Happily, I immediately found a David Foster Wallace book I'd not yet read (more on DFW in a feature sometime soon, too). (Promises, promises, I know...) Facing an uncertain length of airport time in addition to my two three-hour flights, I decided I might need another novel just in case. Hey, I'm a fast reader, what can I say? I wandered around the fiction section without anything hitting my eye, and, as is my tendency, made it over to the sports section, where a book titled Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, caught my eye.

I'm not sure what caused me to open this book first on the Friday night flight out, because I was keen to read the DFW book (still am). But I'm glad I cracked this one too. Unfortunately, a rather splitting headache prevented me from getting more than 50 or 60 pages in, enough time to set the scene - Jon, a writer and in his youth an avid mountain climber, was on assignment to cover one of the guided tours to Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, for a magazine. The angle was that these guided tours made it possible for someone with almost zero climbing experience (and zero high-altitude exposure experience) to be a mountaineer. All you'd need is a LOT of cash.

I know I'd seen a few of my friends reading this book over the past couple years, and it also dawned on me that I'd seen the IMAX movie made about that season as well. My memory is notoriously bad, but eventually I placed it down to when Brooke had visited me in 98 and we'd seen it at the ol' Science Museum. I think the book was mentioned by the narrator, but I'm not sure. In any case, I had heard many positive reviews, and was a bit frustrated to have only just gotten started on the flight out. Plus my head hurt. It sucked.

I was more than amply rewarded on the way home, however. Into Thin Air chronicles one of the deadliest seasons in the history of Everest - Krakauer's group (and a couple of others) were trapped on or near the summit in a storm, and he tries his best to tell the story of what happened, what went wrong, up on the peak that cost 4 or 5 folks (can't remember the number) their lives. The problem is, at high altitude you can't think clearly. So after he tells his story, he then tells about the interviews he did with the other survivors and the folks who were helping from base camp, and the picture becomes a bit clearer. It truly does read like a movie script, making the impact far more moving towards the end. Several times I put my copy down on the plane at the end of a chapter just to absorb what I'd finished reading. It's that good.

I'm not going to go into any further detail - if your interest has been piqued, I highly suggest picking up a copy. Mine was paperback, and cheaper than a movie. Ya can't beat it.

What do you think? Drop us a line at webmaster@simpleprop.com and give us some feedback. Maybe we'll even run your letters in future Gambits. 'The Daily Gambit' is updated every weekday.