Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer went to Everest in 1996 on assignment for Outside magazine and ended up inside one of the deadliest commercial seasons the mountain had ever seen. He reconstructs the hour-by-hour collapse of the guided expeditions caught in a sudden storm near the summit, including the deaths of two famous guides, and interrogates his own decisions as a journalist and climber. The book is part disaster reportage, part indictment of the commodification of extreme altitude, and part quiet accounting of survivor guilt.
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What you might want to know about Into Thin Air
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On assignment for Outside Magazine, Jon Krakauer summited Everest on May 10, 1996. By the next morning, eight climbers were dead, including most of his team. He wrote the book to make sense of it.
Yes. Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer's first-person account of the 1996 Everest disaster, in which eight climbers died on a single day. Krakauer was on the mountain as a journalist for Outside magazine and survived.
The 2015 film Everest draws on Into Thin Air alongside other accounts of the same disaster, including Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb. The film does not credit Krakauer's book directly because of disputes over his portrayal of Boukreev.
Into Thin Air was written by Jon Krakauer, published in 1997 by Villard.
Into Thin Air is 335 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Into Thin Air takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Into Thin Air is a standalone novel by Jon Krakauer, not part of a series.
Into Thin Air is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.