Recommendations
Books Like Into Thin Air
Best books to read after Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is the first-hand account of the 1996 Everest disaster — eight deaths in a single storm, narrated by a survivor. These recommendations continue the Krakauer canon, explore the extreme adventure and survival narrative tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about what human beings risk in the pursuit of the summit.
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Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
The companion Krakauer — Chris McCandless abandoning his conventional life for the Alaskan wilderness; the essential companion for Into Thin Air readers, showing the same question from the opposite angle: not the climber who survives, but the young man who doesn't.
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Under the Banner of Heaven
by Jon Krakauer
The companion Krakauer nonfiction — a Mormon fundamentalist murder and the history of Mormon fundamentalism; shows Krakauer's range as a journalist and the same commitment to obsessive research and vivid reconstruction of events he did not witness.
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Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
The great survival narrative companion — Louie Zamperini's forty-seven days on a raft in the Pacific and his subsequent Japanese POW captivity; shares Into Thin Air's interest in the extremes of human physical endurance and the decisions people make when survival is not guaranteed.
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Endurance
by Alfred Lansing
The Antarctic survival companion — Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1916 and the survival story when the Endurance was crushed by ice; the other great twentieth-century extreme survival narrative and the companion Into Thin Air readers most often recommend.
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The Climb
by Anatoli Boukreev
The companion response to Into Thin Air — guide Anatoli Boukreev's account of the same 1996 Everest disaster, disputing some of Krakauer's characterizations of his actions; essential reading alongside Into Thin Air for readers who want the complete picture.
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Touching the Void
by Joe Simpson
The extreme mountaineering survival companion — Joe Simpson's account of his fall into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes and his crawl back to base camp after his climbing partner cut the rope believing him dead; the other celebrated climber's first-hand survival narrative.
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Wild
by Cheryl Strayed
The female solo outdoor adventure companion — Strayed's Pacific Crest Trail memoir; where Into Thin Air is about the worst that the mountain can do, Wild is about what outdoor challenge can do when the stakes are personal rather than mortal.
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The Perfect Storm
by Sebastian Junger
The sea equivalent of the Everest disaster — the 1991 storm that sank the Andrea Gail and killed all six men aboard, Junger's narrative nonfiction showing the same extreme elements in a different setting and the same question about why people put themselves in such danger.
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