by Debbie Gilbert & Leonard Gill
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer
Villard Books, 291 pp., $24.95
n 1996's Into
the Wild -- one of the best nonfiction books of the decade -- journalist
Jon Krakauer explored why a young man named Chris McCandless went off alone
into the Alaskan wilderness and died there. Krakauer never met McCandless,
yet he constructed a vivid and plausible account of what must have happened.
With his new book, Into Thin Air, Krakauer
didn't have to rely on secondhand reports -- he was there during
every 
gut-wrenching
moment of last year's Mt. Everest tragedy. Outside magazine had sent
him on a guided expedition in order to write about the growing number of
wealthy, inexperienced climbers attempting the summit. Instead, Krakauer
ended up chronicling the ghastly deaths of eight of his fellow mountaineers
-- including Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, two of the most respected guides
in the business. All told, 12 people died on the world's tallest mountain
that spring.
What went wrong on May 10, 1996? On the simplest level, it was a fierce storm that assaulted Everest while several expeditions were approaching the summit. But weather deserves only a portion of the blame; what really killed those climbers was a succession of human errors -- a chain of missteps building ominously into catastrophe.
Krakauer paints a picture of individuals done in by personality flaws, either their own or those of the people they're dependent on. The leader of the South African expedition is shockingly arrogant. The Taiwanese are indifferent. Fischer's assistant Anatoli Boukreev is incapable of being a team player. Hall and Fischer both choose to proceed through marginal conditions in order not to disappoint clients who've paid $65,000 each for a chance at the summit. And then there's a litany of miscommunication between and among teams over who's responsible for which duties.
Even competent mountaineers make poor judgments at 29,000 feet, when their brains are starved for oxygen. So Krakauer is being unreasonably hard on himself when he laments his own inaction -- occurring while he was exhausted and hypoxic to the point of hallucination -- that he believes may have contributed to the death of guide Andy Harris.
What you're left with is a sense of the futility of the endeavor. Krakauer is a skilled, veteran climber, yet he makes it clear that there's no thrill, no glory to be found in confronting Everest. Instead, there is relentless misery: blinding high-altitude headaches; diarrhea and vomiting; feelings of suffocation; frostbite (sometimes resulting in amputation of body parts); life-threatening pulmonary and cerebral edema.
Why would anyone want to climb Everest? In the end, even Krakauer can't answer that question. He only knows that as long as rich people can buy their way to the summit, the mountain will claim more lives. And indeed, in May 1997 Everest has already killed another seven souls who failed to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. -- Debbie Gilbert
By Kirsten Bakis
Farrar Straus Giroux, 291 pp., $23
How writers come by their ideas is anyone's guess and perhaps nobody's business. It's therefore up for grabs where Kirsten Bakis came up with a novel about a society of semihuman canines, and equally fruitless to wonder at the imagination that lit on the idea in the first place. Better to look on Lives of the Monster Dogs as, if not the best novel of the year, then certainly one of this year's most accomplished first novels -- and just as certainly one of the most original.
The primary setting for the book is New York in the very near future. The city is the chosen new home of a group of dogs trained to walk on their hind legs, speak through surgically implanted voice boxes, gesture with prosthetic hands, and think and behave as only a combination dog/man could. What they hadn't been trained to do is slaughter the very masters who bred them, modified them, taught them to speak and taught them to reason even as their dog-natures taught them to obey.
The line of Monster Dogs in Manhattan, however, was only the perfected line. It took the hurt genius of Augustus Rank to conceive the idea of a race of Prussian soldier-dogs over 100 years ago, and that many years for his followers to bring Rank's mad dream to successful completion in an isolated town in Canada. Something, though, is beginning to threaten the dogs' survival when they reach the city, and it isn't their unsuitedness to modern life. Call it a collective identity crisis, or a battle between free will and base instinct. The Monster Dogs are pitched inside that battle, and, as at least one of them fears, instinct will have the upper hand.
Cleo Pira is the name of the young woman whom the dogs befriend and then entrust with their story. But her first-person account is only one of the points of view employed by the author in this extraordinary book. Elsewhere we have the diary of Rank himself as he sets about experimenting on farm animals and suffering crushing disappointment, and the recordings of Ludwig von Sacher, a German Shepherd whose slow descent into madness is as subtly described as it is, in its end stages, profoundly moving.
Too often disappointed by the normal run of contemporary fiction? Lives of the Monster Dogs could help restore your faith, if not in novels, then in dog and man. -- Leonard Gill