Into Thin Air

On May 10, 1996, Jon Krakauer stood on the summit of Mount Everest, his mind clouded by oxygen deprivation and his body running on no sleep for fifty-seven hours. At 29,032 feet, roughly the cruising altitude of a passenger jet, he started the dangerous climb down. Around twenty other climbers were still heading upward, with no idea that a violent storm was rising to meet them.

Krakauer was there as a journalist and a member of a guided expedition, and his book is his firsthand account of what followed. He starts in Kathmandu and carries the reader up the mountain one hard stage at a time, showing how the team's ambition, poor decisions and sheer misfortune came together on the way to the top. The storm that hit that day killed five people in what became the deadliest season Everest climbers had yet recorded.

The book is as much a reckoning as a record. Krakauer survived, but he came home weighed down by guilt over what happened and what he could or could not have done. His reporting is careful and his prose is vivid, and the result is a gripping look at the dangers of high-altitude climbing, the limits of human judgment in extreme conditions, and the courage that surfaced in the worst hours. It is widely regarded as a standout of narrative nonfiction, and it is both thrilling and deeply unsettling.