"Into Thin Air" (1996) from the author of this article is one of the greatest books I've ever read; I highly recommend it for its great storytelling and its description of the Everest microsociety.

"Into Thin Air" Jon Krakauer

"The Great Gatsby" - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Into Thin Air by John Krakauer, although maybe you don't want to read it until after the attempt. :)

Into Thin Air. http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/038...

Amazing story, super inspirational, and lots of great history. My wife and I both loved this book and could not set it down.

Yep. I saw the Everest IMax movie, and thought "Wow, that seems spectacular. Maybe if I'm able someday I'll try it." Then I read "Into Thin Air" and immediately changed my mind. Great read.

How could I forget "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer. Another amazing author, great book.

I also realize none of these are really HN-related content. I just assumed you were looking for any type of books, and this are some of my recent favorite leisure books.

No Shortcuts to the Top is no longer a new book, but it's a great read, especially as something of a counterbalance to Into Thin Air.

You might be looking to read in the vein of "creative non-fiction". Many practitioners, at least the ones I tend to appreciate, also had careers as journalists. Into Thin Air was a mammothly famous example.

Read this absolutely fantastic article: Into thin air by John Krakauer.
http://outsideonline.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_...

This reminds me of a great book I read, "Into Thin Air"[0]. If you're interested in getting a first-hand account of climbing Everest, and what effect novice climbers have had on it, definitely give it a read.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/03...

Interesting! Would you compare Roberts' book with Boukreev's response to Into Thin Air, The Climb?

If you enjoyed Into Thin Air, you must also read Touching the Void.

For a gripping first hand account of the danger and sheer lunacy of today's Mount Everest, I highly recommend "Into Thin Air", by Jon Krakauer

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=upIXVwLhGj0C

These might not be biographies but they are good non fiction.

It's not about the bike, my journey back to life. - Lance Armstrong

Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman! - R. Feynman

Into thin air - J. Krakauer

If you read "Into Thin Air", make sure you also read "The Death Zone" by Matt Dickinson - an interestingly different perspective on the same event.

Outside has been popular for decades. They published the articles that led to Krakauer's books Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

If you liked "Into Thin Air" you should read "The White Spider" about Heinreich Harrer (who was the inspiration for Brat Pitt's character in "Seven Years in Tibet")

One of the best books I have read recently is Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Amazing story mixed with history and inspiration.

I have a post at my blog here: http://westby.io/5-books-ive-read-2018-1/

Some other books I read that I'd recommend:
- Anathem
- Deep Work
- A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Into Thin Air
- Shoe Dog
- Happiness Hypothesis

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

It goes into detail about the Mount Everest disaster in the 90s.

Into Thin Air is another one where I'd highly recommend listening to the audiobook, for more-or-less the same reason.

I recommend reading both the books - "The Climb" by Anatoli Boukreev, and "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Climb_(book)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Thin_Air

You should read «Into thin air». It might be a matter of life or deathto carry a few more kg down. Also, you can't help people too tired to make it and dying on the side : you would die with them. They all know it and accept it I guess.

I just want to add that for a cross country drive, there is no better audio book than "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage". The audio version is absolutely gripping; the suspense is incredible, more so because of the strict linearity of the story as audio (no peeking ahead). I also liked "Into Thin Air" on audio.

"Into Thin Air" by Krakauer. I've seen it other places, too.

It seems that Jon Krakauer's 1997 book "Into Thin Air" about the 1996 disaster that resulted in 8 deaths on Everest has encouraged people to go rather than acting as a warning.

I second the recommendation of Into Thin Air. If you're at all interested in Everest and mountain climbing, get it. It's a page-turner and I could hardly put it down. ISTR I read it in one sitting.

This is my favorite audio book. I had a long drive to a friend’s wedding so I picked up an audio book to listen to, Lansing’s Endurance. I recommend it over the hardcover book, which is the way I consume most non-fiction, because of it incredible suspense.

Not knowing who will survive and who will perish and will they be able to persevere under the most extreme circumstances makes the audio presentation one of the most compelling tales of adventure I’ve ever heard. The book is great, but it includes pictures of the ill-fated expedition and so subtlety foretells aspects of the outcome. I recommend listening to it first, then buying the book.

For real life adventure lovers I also recommend Into Thin Air about climbing Everest and the movie, Mountains of the Moon about the explorer/translator Richard Burton [1].

[1] https://www.adventure-journal.com/2016/06/historical-badass-...

After reading Into Thin Air, what I'm afraid of with Everest is getting permanently sick from the polluted conditions at Base Camp. He describes it as positively disgusting and getting him and his fellow climbers sick with a persistent cough. No way, man.

Kurt Vonnegut is really great, my personal favorite is Sirens of Titan which is his most "sci-fi" of the bunch but I wouldn't really call it sci-fi. Other great starting points are Cat's Cradle, Mothernight, and of course Slaughterhouse Five.

I've only read one Toni Morrison book, Song of Solomon, but that was one of my favorite reads of this year.

If you haven't read Frankenstein or Dracula then I would highly recommend them. I personally enjoyed Frankenstein much more than I thought I would.

Norse Mythology and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman are also fun reads.

If you want some non-fiction, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is a very engaging read.

If you found 'Into The Wild' interesting, make sure to checkout 'Into Thin Air' from the same author. It's about a summit attempt of Everest that went awry and is awesome.

Edit: come to think of it, I've read pretty much everything that Jon Krakauer has written. The guy's grocery lists are probably well thought out and have a compelling narrative.

I just finished reading John Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" for the the third time, and for the third time I was completely enthralled from beginning to end.

This reminded me how fascinated I am by disaster reports.

Into Thin Air got be fascinated with mountaineering, but the next few books I got were all accident reports.

I am not much into fiction, my gift depends on the kind of person I gift to, few books I most of the time prefer gifting,

1. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, for those spiritual minds. I am a huge fan of this book, I am traveling this week to Dharamshala to learn about Buddhism after reading this book.

2.Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, for those aspiring young minds.

3. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, for my adventure loving friends. I had an intense desire to see Mt.Everest after reading this book, I traveled to Everest base camp.

4. Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, for everyone, I don't remember how many I have gifted.

5. Imitation of Christ, I have gifted it, but haven't read it myself. It's in my list.

6. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer

If you like reading adventurous books, i'd recommend it. This one is about the Mt. Everest expedition of a group of people and the disaster that fell upon them.

You're Surely Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

This one is collection of events in the life of Feynman. He's mostly known for being a scientist, but he's equally talented in few other areas as well. An interesting and fun book.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell

Recommended if you are into psychology and knowing how our thoughts and actions are affected by our subconscious.

Read:
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (This was a great read),
The Painter by Peter Heller (Interesting novel),
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (Good ideas and content, repeats a lot)

Currently reading:
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham,
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine,
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Edit: reformatted for clarity.

I read Into Thin Air, about the 1996 account by a reporter who was with the crew that lost 4 members. After poking around I saw someone saying the Sherpas will kick bodies in the crevasses and they wash out in the Spring. Sad, but with a rate of 1:4 before 1996, then 1:7 after on death ratios its gotten much better. However, it takes money/balls/stupidity to climb that thing.

I can’t recommend “Into thin air” by John Krakauer enough.

A true story written with naked emotion by someone who experienced the life altering disaster on Everest.

It’s all too relevant right now with another recent calamity on Everest.

An excerpt from the opening words:

“The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion...

Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it—mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn’t, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity’s immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.“

Into Thin Air is a really intersting book, i remember myself looking at maps of Mt Everest whilst reading it. It got me interested in the Mt Everest spectacle. I just finished reading Dark Summit which, imo, was not as interesting but it does show, in a better way than ITA, how in these extreme conditions persons struggle a lot with the simplest tasks and becomes selfish and only focusing on one thing: summit. No matter if they wont make it down.

There are far deadlier mountains out there than Everest. I think the current death rate is around 5%. Annapurna has killed about 35% of the climbers that attempted.

It has gotten to the point where there are basically proven (about as much as you can for something so dangerous) methods of getting to the top.

"Into Thin Air" is a great book on the journey (the very bad , and the good) to the top.

Weird. We are in the same wavelength right now:

Just came from seeing the 'Everest' movie based on this incident
I did read both the original article you are looking for, (not online) and the book.

I also watched the 2 seasons of the reality show Everest: The Death Zone- precisely based on Russell Brice's company.

It's brutal, and I guess people forget it from time to time for a very small number of years. But the Mountain Never forgets.

The movie is only worth a see on IMAX, enjoy the scenery. Pretty much follows the 'Into Thin Air' book, focused on the American clients + Scott & Rob

Pretty much. I actually found "Into the Wild" to be among his least interesting--probably because I couldn't really identify with McCandless."Into Thin Air" is the book that put him on the mainstream map and it's awesome. "Under the Banner of Heaven" is particularly noteworthy as well--although I found the historical parts the more interesting. (The modern story was mostly just depressing.)

Actually, Everest is considered as on the easier side for an eight-thousander [1]. Annapurna got %38 (2007 figures) [2] and K2 got %25 [3].

For some interesting discussion on Everest fatalities, try this one [4]. "No shortcuts to the top" by Ed Viesturs and the well known "Into thin air" by Jon Krakauer are two good books on the subject, if you want to read more.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2
{4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295

I felt the A-story / B-story narrative split in "Banner Of Heaven" made the read a little too disjointed for my taste. Just when the A story is getting good, the B story comes along and stops it dead in its tracks. Then, vice versa. Incidentally, I also found the historical narrative infinitely more fascinating than the present-day narrative. It is exceedingly hard to pull off an A/B structure when both A and B are given nearly equal weight. One of them needs to be subordinated to the other. Krakauer does the equal-weight A/B better than most, but in some ways I think it's just a fundamentally suboptimal approach.

"Into Thin Air" is a fantastic read. It's got its flaws, but they're very minor and quickly forgotten.

I had a weird year, reading no new 2015 books. Here's a handful I enjoyed the most:

"Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann" - probably needs no introduction here on HN, but some wonderful anecdotes by Richard Feynmann.

"Red Plenty" by Francis Spufforth. Enjoyable (and apparently thoroughly well researched) depiction of life in the Soviet Union during its rise and decline

"My Ten Years Imprisonment" by Silvio Pellico. An autobiographical account of an Italian revolutionary during the times of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was imprisoned in a castle I live next to.

"Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer - luckily a couple of months before Everest was released (it was recommended in an HN discussion)

Yay, I'm going to model my library after someone else's opinion of what I ought to read! Literature ought to be a popularity contest!

I think I've read over half of the volumes mentioned there, and disliked a lot of them. I thought "The Grapes of Wrath" was awful, and never did figure out why anybody was ever impressed by "The Catcher In The Rye". To me, both of those were good examples of books that people read because other people read them, and nobody can really describe why they're so profound, but since everybody else has read them, they must be. And, among all these "profound" works, they included "Into Thin Air". I enjoyed it, and I used to be a climber, but what's it doing on that list?

Then, there are the many titles not found on the list. How about "The Decameron", for one? "Pale Blue Dot"? "A Brief History of Time"? "Cosmos"? "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"?

And, I'd argue that reading should be done as much for enjoyment as for edification. So, why not some "Calvin and Hobbes"? Or "Words I Wish I Wrote"? Or some Neil Gaiman or Greg Bear or George RR Martin?

I'm not ranting at you; I agree with you 100%. Your comment just seemed like an appropriate place to attach a rant against the article. :-)

I really feel sad for these sherpas that have to work as care givers for these unprepared losers from the west (most of them seem to be) that just want to impress their kin back home.

I suggest the book "Into Thin Air" (and the movie version "Everest") if you want to know more about how the commercial side of Everest climbing works (and about a really sad tragedy).

Sherpas were on all the big western expeditions that I know of. Their names are just usually dropped when talking about it, which is a shame. I recently read Krakauer's Into Thin Air and appreciated that he treated the sherpas on the expedition as fellow humans. They figured as important as anyone else in the story. He was also careful when talking about past climbs to mention all the climbers, sherpa and otherwise.

Very interesting book for me. I knew (know?) very little about mountaineering.

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

The Ultimate Question 2.0 - Fred Reichheld‎

The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Moonshot! - John Sculley

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

Republic - Plato

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

False Memory - Dean Koontz

NOS4A2- Joe Hill

Revival - Stephen King

Barbarians At The Gate - John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

Into Thin Air - John Krakauer

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

This is the thing that I was wishing existed a couple of months ago when I read "Into Thin Air". It's a fantastic read about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster where eight climbers died, but I often had difficulty visualising what was going on. (There's also a film, Everest, due out next year.)

To be better convey what it's like to climb Everest, I think this visualisation would be improved if it had more annotations about what makes climbing difficult and the dangers involved. For example, the Khumbu Icefall is a fast moving glacier with many crevasses and ice towers, and has a habit of hosting avalanches and falling ice towers. Climbers try to limit the amount of time they spent here due to the danger, although Sherpa guides tend to cross it many times to stock Camp 1 in preparation for their clients.

If you haven't read them already, I really recommend the following two books:

"Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer was the first book to critically explore the "Death Zone" and the state of mountaineering on Everest generally- It was written in 1997, but is just as relevant now.

"Dark Shadows Falling" by Joe Simpson is another commentary on the state of mountaineering on Everest in 1997. Simpson was famously left for dead on a high altitude climb (described in "Touching The Void"), so he brings a keen insight into the morals of high-altitude climbing from the point of view of the "one that was left behind".

I think you are making several incorrect and unfair generalizations.

Calling those climbers "rich idiots" is unnecessary, and hugely inaccurate. Nearly all guided Everest expeditions require previous high-peak mountaineering experience to join the expedition, in places such as Aconcagua and Denali [1][2][3]. Technical familiarity with crampons, ice-axe, etc' is a must, and a high level of fitness is required.

People who join those expeditions are not "rich idiots" who think they are going on a cruise. They are amateur climbers with money, who are interested in broadening their climbing experience and achieving their personal goals.

Guiding companies provide a relatively safe opportunity for those climbers to achieve this, as this is something they cannot do by themselves.

I also wouldn't be so quick to pass moral judgments on things that happen 8000+ meters above sea level, in conditions of extreme fatigue, after several weeks of hiking/climbing. What you think you would do while sitting on a chair in front of your computer is not necessarily what you would've done were you actually there.

I recommend reading something like Into thin Air [4] to get a better perspective on what happens on those climbs.

[1] http://www.alpineascents.com/everest.asp
[2] http://www.rmiguides.com/himalaya/everest/
[3] http://www.adventureconsultants.com/adventure/FAQEverest/
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/038...

Is it easier than when Hillary did it? Of course. Is it still incredibly dangerous, where every ascent is a serious gamble with you life? Yes.

There have, even in recent years, been disastrous years where entire parties have been lost. Here's a list of the deaths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_on_eight-thousan...

Many more than that number come back down being carried by their friends, with lungs full of fluid, brain damage, black fingers/toes/hands/feet/noses which need to be amputated, or other serious injuries.

A fantastic read is "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, which covers a really bad year for climbing on Everest.

"Into Thin Air" (Krakauer)
Journalist/Mountaineer account of an Everest expedition gone wrong. Read it, ponder, but know that there is some controversy. Very interesting look into expedition dynamics.

"Mountains Beyond Mountains" (Kidder)
An account of Paul Farmer's work in Haiti, and later in other parts of the world. If you are interested in public health it is a great read, and may provide a fresh angle on recent Haiti <-> world politics.

"Three Cups of Tea" (Oliver, I think)
Greg Mortensen starts building schools in Pakistan / Afghanistan. Adventure ensues. There's some definite political bias here but it's worth a read.

Fun summer read: "World War Z".

Unrelated, I use Shelfari [http://www.shelfari.com/] to organize my books-to-read, if you need an organization tool.

I always thought about doing Everest if I could ever afford it. You know, one those idle "I'll do that someday thoughts" we all have.

Once I hit the "I could afford this" point I started researching Everest...read Into Thin Air, Dark Summit, No Shortcuts to the Top, etc., watched every documentary I could get my hands on, even talked with one of the climbers featured on the Discovery series that featured Russel Brice's company.

I've concluded that I'm not interested. I'm not interested in standing in line at the Second Step for hours while my body consumes itself and I burn through the scant amount of oxygen I have. I'm not interested in the very real risk that I may arrive back at Camp IV after a summit attempt to find my O2 and supplies stolen. I'm not interested in seeing the corpses, oxygen bottles, tents, and other detritus cluttering up the mountain.

I'm not condemning those who chose to go or those who help them get there, but I'm out: human behavior has made the idea of summiting Everest unappealing.