Into Thin Air

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This article contains the information about the non-fiction book, for the TV series produced by TVB, please refer to Into Thin Air.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details the author's expedition up Mount Everest on May 10, 1996, which turned catastrophic when eight climbers were killed on one day by a 'rogue storm'. The author's expedition was led by the famed guide Rob Hall and there were other groups trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency was perceived as a competitor to Rob Hall's agency.

In the book, Krakauer writes about the events leading up to his eventual decision to partake in an Everest expedition, despite how he had given up mountain climbing long ago. Initially, Krakauer, being a journalist for Outside Magazine, stated that his intentions to climb Everest are purely professional. However, he later confesses that this was "bullshit" and that his true intentions to climb Everest lie in the reawakening of his desire to climb mountains like the alpinist heroes of his childhood. From there, the book chronologically moves between events that take place on the mountain and the eventual unfolding of the tragedy which takes place during the push to the summit.

This book, being a rare first hand account of such a catastrophe, became a best seller. It also incited a controversy in the mountaineering community in its criticism of Anatoli Boukreev, an extremely experienced mountaineer who was serving as one of Fischer's guides, and had chosen to climb without using supplementary oxygen. Boukreev descended to Camp IV before Fischer's clients, and was later instrumental in rescuing the survivors from the South Col. Boukreev later defended his decisions in his own book, The Climb. In addition, Beck Weathers also wrote a book about the disaster titled Left For Dead.

A 1997 TV movie named Into Thin Air: Death on Everest starred Peter Horton as Scott Fischer and Christopher McDonald as Jon Krakauer. It followed Krakauer as he chronicled the expedition. The movie, however, is extremely dramatized and chronicles events that never happened on the mountain. The event was factually covered in the 1998 IMAX movie Everest, which was coincidentally being filmed in May 1996. The film crew interrupted their shoot to aid the distressed climbers.

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