Krakauer's highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event.

Everest, saw nothing that 'suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.' He was wrong. 'A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism.' - PEOPLE A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more-including Krakauer's-in guilt-ridden disarray. Krakauer continues to write prolifically his most recent book, on college rape cases, was published in 2015.#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Since the late 90s, Krakauer has published successful books on a number of topics, including the Mormon Church, the death of the marine Pat Tillman, and the life of Christopher McCandless (which formed the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film Into the Wild, starring Emily Hirsch). Krakauer would eventually publish his version of these events in the bestselling book Into Thin Air (1996). In 1996, Krakauer was involved in a major mountaineering disaster at Mount Everest, in which four of his teammates died in the middle of a snowstorm. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, he began contributing articles about mountaineering and the natural world to the magazine Outside, and by the end of the decade, he was supporting himself by writing full time.

During these years, Krakauer supported himself almost entirely as a fisherman and a carpenter. As a young man, he developed a passion for mountain climbing, and throughout the 1970s he traveled to Alaska, Patagonia, and Mount Everest in search of difficult climbs. Jon Krakauer grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied environmental science at Hampshire College.

Mount everest book into thin air