Grabbed this out of a Little Free Library a while a go, started it in a coffee shop this morning, finished it this evening. It's a gripping as hell read, grim and gruesome in parts (there are real reasons climbers call 25,000+ feet "the death zone") and there's some ancillary stuff about people wanting to discredit Krakauer for whatever reasons--some of those reasons are probably because the business of guiding people up Everest doesn't come off looking all that great here, even in some alternate timeline where the expeditions don't bottleneck at the summit right as a squall is moving in, and the people leading those businesses especially don't come off looking super great, and those people were some of the people who died in May of 1996, and they had people they left behind who didn't like that their loved ones came off not looking super great. Very high mountains are deadly, and there's no way to completely negate the statistics. I get the feeling looking at timeframes that this is the book that made Krakauer's reputation, and that's pretty well deserved. Very worth reading, if you can deal with the subject matter.
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