Great passages - Krakauer

“Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I’d been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon the energy to care.”

Those words belong, of course, to intrepid author Jon Krakauer describing himself atop Everest in his bestselling “Into Thin Air,” a harrowing tale of risk, hubris, sacrifice, foolishness and death on that mountain. As one NY Times book reviewer put it, “People climb Mount Everest because it -- and the money -- is there.” Krakauer was there, and he explains Everest’s hypnotic (and often fatal) allure brilliantly.