Disaster on Mt Everest

Mountaineer Jon Krakauer's detailed account of the disaster that took place on Mt Everest in 1996

outlook_admin_fom

September 18, 2014

This book about Everest has to be one of the best travel books I’ve read. Well, it’s not really a travel book in the normal sense but certainly in an extreme sense. Everest has really become a mountain you can climb as a tourist. It is no longer the beautiful, great mountain that it was; where you could travel without destroying it. Jon Krakauer gets the sense of tragedy right, and in great detail. But it’s also a very exciting and gripping book. You can’t stop once you start reading it. It’s also extremely realistic: you get a real feel of what it’s like to be on the mountain, and what it takes to climb it, and how so many people go to climb it for the wrong reasons. You have to train for it, have experience on mountains, enjoy climbing, enjoy the mountains and the difficulties it throws at you. So many things are out of your control there, and so many things can go wrong, things that feel small but snowball into huge tragedies. It really captures both the beauty and the danger of mountains.

Reinhold Messner is a pioneering mountaineer, the first to climb all fourteen 8,000m peaks.