Personal Review: Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer

Briggs Cline
Ms. Dover
English 211-1
11 November 2015
On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment.
Into Thin Air-Reading Response 1 Into Thin Air is a true story written by Jon Krakauer. He was a writer for Outside Magazine and an avid mountain climber. Krakauer would climb a mountain and write an article about his trip for the magazine. Being a mountain climber, he was always attracted to Everest, the pinnacle of climbing. He talked to the magazine editor to see if the magazine would pay for him to go to Everest if he wrote an article on it. Initially, the magazine said they would only cover a certain amount of the trip, but eventually covered it all. The author clearly has a love for climbing and through this love he strongly expresses

One such emotion that continues to pop up throughout the book is worry; but what causes him to worry and what causes the reader to worry for him? Through his description of events in the first half of his book, it is clear that he becomes worried about the ability of his team mates. He first describes concern when he and his team mates were getting ready for their first trip above base camp to begin the acclimation process. Krakauer was putting on his crampons and noticed a few of his team mates opening brand new pairs of crampons. As a reader, finding out that these people were just then opening something brand new, and had never used those specific items before, worried me. They might not fit their boots, they wouldn’t be comfortable with them, or they might not even know how to use them. When someone does the same thing the same way every time, they become comfortable with it, and are better able to complete the task, as opposed to someone who is trying it for the first time—practice makes perfect. I began to think that surely these people have been climbing before and know what they are doing, so they should