欧宝娱乐

This is not a review. I don鈥檛 feel like writing a review for this book, but I feel like I should at least say something about it because I did enjoy it. I mean, it did make me utter 鈥淛esus Christ鈥� out loud more than one time, and I don鈥檛 often talk to myself while I am reading a book.

(I almost want to post a picture of a LOLcat with a caption that says 鈥淭his buk wuz gud,鈥� but I don鈥檛 have one.)

So鈥hese are a few things I learned from reading this book:

1. If a person decides to climb Everest, they are likely to encounter dead bodies along the route up to the summit.

2. Lobuje, which is on the way to Everest Base Camp, is a place that overflows with human excrement. While Krakauer was there in 1996, he wrote "Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it." Lovely. Insert 鈥淲ant to get away from it all?鈥� commercial here.

3. Without the assistance of Sherpas, it is unlikely that climbers would be able to reach the summit at all. Besides schlepping tons of your crap, they also know the way, and they place climbing ropes and in some instances, repair ladders, so people will be able to ascend the trickier places.

The place would also be a lot dirtier without them because they are partially responsible for removing some of the trash that Everest has accumulated over the years. One camp reported having around a thousand empty canisters of supplemental oxygen (as I said below in a review comment, so I might as well stick it in here, too).

4. In 1996, it cost $65,000 to be a client on a guided tour climbing Everest.

5. It is very easy to develop high-altitude sicknesses and/or hallucinations as a climber gets closer to the summit. In fact, the "every man/woman for him/herself" attitude that people had, whether or not they had to have it in order to survive, was more than a little disturbing.

On this particular excursion, two climbers got stuck on the mountain during a storm. They spent the night at 28,000 feet without shelter or supplemental oxygen and were believed to be dead. The guide sent to look for them the next day found them barely breathing after chipping off three inches of ice from their faces. Believing that they were beyond help, he left them there. One of the climbers, my personal hero, woke up from his coma hours later and was lucid enough to get himself back down to one of the camps. Sure, he lost half an arm, his nose, and all of the digits on his other hand to frostbite, but he's still alive.

Oh, and sure, the events that happened on Mt. Everest in 1996 were tragic, but I do think the people who climb it know what they are risking.