I feel we've talked about this, because somehow I knew that. My beef with Krakauer is that he glorifies stupid risk-taking, not adventure. Know how there's a certain love for Robert Scott and a certain loathing for Roald Amundsen, even though Amundsen beat him by more than a month and returned uneventfully without a body count? True - Scott suffered exquisitely and kept that stiff British upper lip the whole way, dying in a most gentlemanly and picturesque way while Amundsen just sorta checklisted his way through adventure? Krakauer plays right into that. He's a Scott man, a reviler of Amundsens. He writes to glorify foolhardy adventure and dismiss caution, expertise and preparation. Into Thin Air is a book about what a glorious and noble calling it is to be an overbred fuckup and as a consequence, everyone in that book is painted as an overbred fuckup. The fact that there were like three books in response to Into Thin Air calling every other word of it bullshit leads me to believe that Krakauer is far more into his tone than he is into his facts, and his tone drives me up the freaking wall. Two thirds of the way through that book I wanted those people to die. I wanted them to suffer for their sins. And when they ended up being saved by a fucking IMAX crew I was damn near laughing. Krakauer made a saint out of Chris McCandless, whose primary claim to fame is to walk unprepared into the Alaska wilderness and dying half a day's walk from civilization. That ain't noble, that's stupid. And when stupidity is presented as nobility, my hackles go up.
God, that's the perfect summation of why I dislike that story.Krakauer made a saint out of Chris McCandless, whose primary claim to fame is to walk unprepared into the Alaska wilderness and dying half a day's walk from civilization. That ain't noble, that's stupid. And when stupidity is presented as nobility, my hackles go up.
I'm really with you on hating his writing style. He's got a lot of climber's pretension he seems to buy into. Reading his description of each person on the mountain I felt vaguely guilty, like I was listening to a shameless gossip talk trash about everyone else. I understand each person processes trauma differently, I'm not passing judgement on him as a person. I just don't think I'll be reading any of his other books any time soon.
If you're looking for polar opposites, I recommend Mark Bowden or Sebastian Junger. Bowden's writing style is basically "these are people doing their job, which is dangerous and difficult." Sebastian Junger is more of a "at 8:30 am things weren't too terrible, but they were pretty terrible by 9, and by 9:30 people were dying despite their noble and valiant efforts, here's a 20-page writeup on meteorology."