Jon Krakauer

It was a very good book. Some parts were slow only because it was a constant going back and forth or the author's biography and the protagonist's tragic life story. If you ever need to be inspired to explore the wild, I would recommend this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it wasn't that long of a book, which took me twice as long to finish because I was in school.

If you're the kind of person that can sit down for hours and read a book through cover to cover, I would highly suggest reading this one. What I liked about this book is the fact that the author doesn't set out to criticize the protagonist for what he did and the outcome of such, but he tried to understand why he did what he did by retracing his steps and writing about it.

When I started the book, I felt sorrow for what had happened, but interestingly enough, by the end of the book I got a sense of closure.

In short, loved the book, good read!… (mer)

I've been wanting to read this ever since I became obsessed with extreme mountaineering survival and disaster stories. There's something about people willingly venturing into an environment so hostile to human life, and the ways that can go wrong, and the moral questions that come up in these extreme situations, that is utterly fascinating to me.

Jon Krakauer was present during the 1996 Everest disaster, when a storm engulfed climbers on the highest slopes of the mountain and several lives were lost. He seems to be quite honest in his account, the mistakes he made, and committed to giving his companions a fair hearing. He is frank that altitude sickness may have affected his memories, and his realisation that he may have been wrong about who he saw enter camp is haunting.

A great window into the world of extreme mountaineering, the psychology that drives summit fever, and how small decisions can so quickly turn to disaster in such an environment.… (mer)

Part story of the Lafferty murderers, part potted history of early Mormonism, part brief overview of the many branches of Mormon Fundamentalism (with a focus on a couple and the ridiculous amount of family relationships between them)

Primarily it's a history of the Lafferty clan and the murders - this has the most detail afforded to it. A lot of this is directly taken from Dan Lafferty (one of the murderers') talking; it makes sense but it feels a bit icky sometimes that he just gets to give his own side basically without contradiction.

One thing it never really touches on even though everything else is practically begging for it is *why* people find themselves attracted to frankly bizarre claims of personal revelation or the constricted life of fundamentalism. An early event in the Lafferty story is Dan sharing his revelation of how important and great polygamy etc is with his brothers and having them all extremely receptive - Dan says it was so amazingly easy that he considered it a sign from God that he was right. It's easy to imagine the appeal of polygamy to a man but having like 5 of them who were previously solid Mormon conservatives take it up does seem baffling - yet the author doesn't spend any time on it. The subject comes up again around the birth of Mormonism, where things are pinned mostly down to Joseph Smith's personal charisma. Obviously this is an extremely complicated subject but it did feel like a weird omission sometimes.… (mer)