highcrimes.jpgFor some reason, I love reading about expeditions to Everest. I loved “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer (an awesome writer) and enjoyed “The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm” by Matt Dickinson and “Doctor on Everest: Emergency Medicine at the Top of the World – A Personal Account of the 1996 Disaster” by Kenneth Kamler. “Climbing High : A Woman’s Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy” by Lene Gammelgaard wasn’t as good, but I didn’t have any major complaints about it. “High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed’ by Michael Kodas just plain sucked.
It was an interesting subject: how Everest has become so busy and commercialized that it has attracted all sorts of crime and unethical behavior. Injured, overtired or confused climbers are often left for dead by others trying to make it to the summit of the mountain and back. Under-equipped climbers steal provisions, equipment and in particularly oxygen bottles from others, severely risking the lives of the victims. Sherpas (who really come up horrible in this book) demand more money to continue mid-way through the climbs and to rescue injured climbers, attack them, leave them for dead (while still alive) and also steal equipment. Guides abandon their clients and participate in side-business of dubious morality of not legality. One particularly dangerous one is the refilling of oxygen bottles, often without informing the buyers of the fact – refilled bottles have a high failure rate, and at 8,000 meters a failing oxygen bottle may very well kill you. And then there is prostitution, gambling, overdrinking, drug and steroid use and other vices of civilization.
It was very interesting to find out all of this, and if I ever had dreamt of climbing Everest (which I haven’t, because I do have some grip on reality), this book definitely would have made think twice about it.
The problem with the book, however, is that it was very badly written and organized even worse. There are two major story lines in the book – an account of the author’s own 2004 Connecticut Expedition and the account of an elderly Bolivian climber who died on Everest and the alleged responsibility of his guide. These are told more or less in chronological order and, while ultimately boring, they are easy enough to follow. Other stories, however, appear disjointedly throughout the book. In some of them, the author expresses what seems to be sincere admiration for specific individuals, in others, those same individuals are torn apart. People do have good and bad sides, but there is too little character development to understand what these people are really like.
The story of the disintegration of the Connecticut team is also not very understandable. The author suggests that members of the team turned against other members suddenly, but there is little explanation about how that came about. He seems more interested in vilifying his perceived enemies than in finding an objective place from which to look at the expedition. Jon Krakauer he is not.
He also can’t write like Krakauer, it’s suprising to me that he is a professional writer (a journalist), and while he uses the tools of storytelling, he doesn’t do it successfully.
In sum, as far as Everest books go, this is way down the pile.