EIGER DREAMS: Ventures among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer

5 out of 5 stars

Non-fiction; articles about climbers

On Amazon UK HERE
On Amazon.com HERE
On Goodreads HERE

Eiger Dreams is a terrific collection of (mostly) previously published articles by mountaineering maestro, outdoorsman and internationally acclaimed writer Jon Krakauer.  

I loved every one of these, there's not one single weak one.  He writes about the summer when thirteen experienced climbers were killed on K2, about the glacier pilots of Talkeetna in Alaska who fly the climbers out to base camps (a very risky business to be in!), and about the snobbery amongst the European mountaineering community of Chamonix.  There is much humour, too ~ an amusing piece about the English Burgess brothers, Yorkshire 'scallywags' of the climbing world, and about the boredom of being stuck in a tent in inclement weather.  

Best of all, at the end, there's a longer version of Krakauer's own experience, when he was twenty-three, of taking on the fearsome Devil's Thumb in Alaska ~ on his own (a shorter version is included in Into The Wild).  It's thrilling, funny and fascinating all at the same time, and the more I read all of these the more I wanted to know about the unusual people who become obsessed with this most dangerous of sports.

Very, very readable and highly recommended.

INTO THIN AIR by Jon Krakauer is reviewed HERE, with links to my reviews of INTO THE WILD, UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, AND MISSOULA