Maybe that’s why Everest keeps getting bigger. When I was a kid, it was 29,002 feet, and according to this, it’s 29,031 feet, not so many years later. (Yeah, yeah, I know about plate tectonics and all that stuff.)
And “Into Thin Air” is an auto/biography, not a novel. I did see the TV movie when it first aired, also around the time I read the book, and it was actually quite good.
Oops, forgot to post the link.
Upon reflection…I never thought of novels as being exclusively fictitious, which I suspect is what you’re getting at. I didn’t mean to call its veracity into question, but some have.
I was reading Wikipedia…
Krakauer’s recounting of certain aspects of the climb has generated criticism, both from some of the climb’s participants and from fellow mountaineers such as Galen Rowell. Much of the disputed material centers on Krakauer’s accounting of the actions of Russian climber and guide Anatoli Boukreev.
It’s one man’s potentially flawed point of view of something that happened in real life, which was challenged later.
But, touché. He certainly doesn’t present it as something he invented.
That’s OK. It’s not uncommon for people to refer to any book as a novel, especially if they read the paperback version.
It’s the first time I have come across this notion, but you are right. According to this, it does seem to be a fairly recent drift in meaning.
"Novel" is increasingly used to mean any book, fiction or nonfiction
The movie Meru was a good documentary featuring hard-core climbing. They took a couple of cameras with them, too; the footage was not re-enacted.
I read the electronic version.
I’ve never been a bookworm; I’m fine with calling it a book instead of calling it a novel (which always signified to me “longer than a short story, more detailed and thorough/in-depth.”)
With the truth under fire these days I suppose we’ll need to be more circumspect about how we label things, at least for those who value the distinctions. The best, hardest-biting, non-fiction will be labeled as fiction by its detractors. I’ll think twice before calling a non-fiction work a “novel” again, so thanks!
ETA: A sentence expresses a complete idea. A paragraph develops that idea. What does a chapter do? That was kind of my thinking about novels. It was nebulous. The fiction/non- makes sense though.
Alright we’re talking about this, and I never started a new thread, but…
I call bullcrap on Krakauer. He says he wishes he’d never climbed Everest? It’s really Into Thin Air that put him into the public limelight. Sure, Into the Wild was an NY Times best seller, but it was ITA that generated the momentum to make ITW a movie. And to make Under the Banner of Heaven into a TV show. I think that is out now, streaming somewhere.
I haven’t followed Krakauer’s life closely but I did read ITA 6x, and then I read the books of (almost) all who were on the mountain that May of 1996. I especially wanted to read Boukriev’s book, because Krakauer blasted him tremendously in ITA.
Everest, and ITA, made Krakauer very rich.
Bullcrap, Krakauer. Crapauer.
You think he wasn’t traumatized by what happened and the deaths of his friends??? You think the money he made should have changed his attitude?
They weren’t his friends, they were other clients. He knew Rob Hall and Scott Fischer more than he did the clients, but I don’t think they were especially close. Or were they?
Yes it was a traumatic experience. Definitely. To be powerless to help up at Camp IV when others were dying so close, has to inflict some kind of survivor’s guilt.
But has that been Krakauer’s message since the late 1990s? Or is that something new, this hating of Everest 1996?
I admit that Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books and that I have great admiration for Jon Krakauer as a writer. But one of my strongest memories of the first time I read the book was how desperately sad I felt for Krakauer, and how I hoped that he was getting help to deal with his emotions, because it was clear from the book how traumatized he was by his experience. At the time I was genuinely worried that he might harm himself. I’ve followed his career ever since, and it’s always been my impression that he saw what happened on Everest in 1996 as a terrible tragedy, and that he would gladly have traded the fame and success it brought him if it meant that the tragedy could have been averted.
Don’t forget for a short while K2 was the tallest mountain in the world. Then it shrunk.
Fun fact: the reason Everest was reported as 29,002 was because it measured out (at the time) at 29,000 but they figured no one would believe such a perfect round number.
I read both books. I thought Boukriev’s was a self-serving excuse trying to justify letting people die. He was a guide, but he went without oxygen and left people behind in his “summit fever”.
Both he and Krakauer described pretty much the same events, but Boukriev made excuses how it wasn’t his job, man. Well, he’s dead now, so he can’t add any more clarity.
I also read both books and I noted that Boukriev went out twice to bring back climbers and single-handedly saved the lives of at least three or four people. Nobody else went out into the storm and brought people back. I don’t think he did everything right and I think that the truth lies between the two books but if you don’t criticize the Sherpa for not using oxygen, then you shouldn’t criticize him for it. He regularly climbed without oxygen. There are a lot of people at fault for that mess. I just wish that they had learned from it.
Yes, Boukriev saved Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fix, and Tim Madsen. No clients died out of Boukriev’s party. His rescue efforts were heroic and tremendous.
The only clients who died were from Rob Hall’s party: Yasuko Namba, and Doug Hansen.
ETA, and you could add Beck Weathers to that list too, except he saved himself in his miraculous recovery.
Thought I’d share photos of my wife and me with Beck Weathers. He gave a talk of his experience and rescue some years back.
I don’t find those two statements to be mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible that writing about something unpleasant that happened to him made Krakauer rich and he likes the money but not the memories of what happened.
Beck Weathers also got some fame and fortune from that same climbing season, but for all that may be I’d guess he’d like his toes and hands and original nose back. (I read Weathers’ account - he stated climbing Everest was the worst mistake he ever made and expresses regret for all the negative consequences, including the impact on his family from his maiming)
Or, to go a little further afield - John Walsh got fame, riches, and influence and probably likes the money and attention, but all that happened because his son was brutally murdered and only his head ever recovered. I’m pretty sure he hates that his son was murdered and mutilated even if subsequent events led to some material benefits for him.
Have you read the book? Have you heard any interviews of him? It was pretty clear from my reading that he hated the events at the time and ever since then.
As for the accounts differing - gee, you’ve got several individuals and ALL of them were suffering from hypoxia to one degree or another, which is known for distorting thinking and behavior. And that’s aside form the fact that different participants in an event can have considerably different recollections even in normal circumstances.
No, Beck Weathers didn’t “save himself”. He somehow managed to survive long enough for others to get him help to get the rest of the way down the mountain. Yes, he made it to Camp IV, but by the time medivac arrived Beck could no longer walk on his own. Without other people he would have died.
And “miraculous” recovery? Yeah, try reading his account of what happened later, toes falling off when he walked down the hallway of his home, his fingers turning black and shriveling, the amputations, the reconstruction of his face, his depression and the problems with his family relationships… it’s not a Hallmark ending. Sure, he’s made the best of it, but the only “miracle” was that survived a night exposed on the mountain, the rest was a lot of hard work by a lot of other people to get his ass down the mountain and clean up the mess he’d made of his body.
Also, it was the cast and crew of the IMAX film who helped Weathers and others get down, then returned to summit themselves, as shown in the film. Director David Breashears, Ed Viesturs, Araceli Segara, Jamling Norgay, and others in their party potentially scuttled this major effort to get an IMAX film camera to the top for the first time in order to save lives.
Save himself, and miraculous recovery — I could have been more clear on this but I refer specifically about him, after spending the night on the south col without any shelter and fully exposed to the fierce storm, was about him walking up, realizing he was in a jam and that no cavalry was coming to save him. He got his own ass to stand up and stumble into Camp IV. He saved himself by doing that.
Yes, Brasher and Viesturs, and not to mention them offering up their O2 canisters, and also Peach Weathers arranging for the help lift because it would be near impossible for him to get through the icefall.
Yes okay, I can see that angle of it. The other examples make sense too, Beck Weather and John Walsh.
Broughton Coburn’s book, Mountain Without Mercy, is a large format book with veryy good pictures. It followed Breashears’ IMAX expedition, rescue efforts, and delayed and successful summit attempt. Recommended.
Information on the base camps:
