Volume 44, Number 13 · August 14, 1997
The Revenge of Everest
By Caroline Fraser
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer
Villard, 293 pp., $24.95
Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
Anchor/Doubleday, 207 pp., $12.95 (paper)
On September 13, 1992, The New York Times ran an Associated Press story with the headline, 'Dying in the Wild, A Hiker Recorded the Terror.' The remains of an unidentified man, who had apparently been injured and stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, had been discovered along with a cryptic journal that recorded months of starvation and fear. The journal entries were telegraphically brief: 'Weakness,' 'Snowed in,' 'Disaster,' 'Fall through the ice.' It seemed to be simply the story of a gruesome accident, the kind of thing that happens in Alaska as a result of inexperience or bad luck, Alaska being so vast and inhospitable that anything from a Sunday hike outside Anchorage to a tourist flight over the mountains can become a nightmare. But after an autopsy and investigation it turned out that the stranded, injured hiker had, in fact, sustained no serious injuries and, in the strangest way, had deliberately stranded himself.
Review, 7379 words
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