The book I read over the summer was Into Thin air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. It tells the story of his expedition up Mt. Everest in the spring of 1996, and the storm that occurred near the top, that killed six people and left two people missing still to this day. The character we follow is the author, and how he changes during the climb. The reader get an up close and personal account on the physical perils of the climbing Everest and how they affect Krakauer, both mentally and physically. He writes about a night they stayed in a lodge full of smoke from the stove heating the room and its' affects on his health during the climb, saying "By morning my eyes were burning and bloodshot, my nostrils were clogged with black soot, and I'd developed a dry persistent hack that would stay with me until the end of the expedition. (Krakauer 52) He also suffered a major bout of guilt and greif after the deaths of his fellow climbers in the disaster. Near the end of the book, he talks about how he couldn't save anyone stuck out on in the storm, even though he was in his tent, totally unaware to the people stuck in the storm, saying "And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 359 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of greif and guilt-ridden aelf-approach. (Krakauer 271). The whole theme of this book, I feel, is that risks are in everything that we do, and, as in this disaster, the people perished doing for what some had dreamt of doing there whole lives. We all are mortal, and we should all go out there and take risks, but we have to realize, like Krakauer did, that some things that we do are dangerous and we have to accept those dangers as a part of our existence.
The article that I have chosen is a New York Times book review of my book. Appropriately called "Fatal Attraction", it explores why so many people pay so much money (up to $70,000) to climb an extremely dangerous mountain.
The video I have chosen is a trailer for the 1998 IMAX film "Everest". I chose it because the author of Into Thin Air mentions seeing this crew filming a climb up Everest, but not the authors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PafBF3mpckE
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