The Climb
On the evening of May 10, 1996, a sudden storm caught climbers near the summit of Mount Everest and killed eight people before the next morning. The lead guide for one of those expeditions, Russian mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev, wrote The Climb as his own account of that night, responding in particular to Jon Krakauer's bestselling Into Thin Air and its criticism of his tactics. Boukreev defends his decision to summit without supplemental oxygen and to descend ahead of his clients, then describes how, once the storm hit, he went back up alone into the death zone and personally pulled three climbers off the South Col. Written with journalist G. Weston DeWalt, the book is part mountaineering memoir, part rebuttal, and a gripping, unsparing look at high-altitude decision-making under conditions most readers will never experience.
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An expedition guide tells his side of the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster, when a sudden storm caught multiple commercial teams above 26,000 feet, leaving eight climbers dead and the surviving guides facing hard public questions.
The most commonly searched is The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev (1997), a memoir of the 1996 Everest disaster. Boukreev was a Russian climber whose perspective differs significantly from Jon Krakauer's account in Into Thin Air.
Both books cover the 1996 Mount Everest disaster from different perspectives. Krakauer was a journalist embedded with one group; Boukreev was a guide with a different team. Boukreev's account challenges several of Krakauer's claims.
The Climb is 396 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Climb takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Climb is a standalone novel by Jonas Jonasson, not part of a series.
The Climb is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
