Why do people endeavor to climb a mountain as dangerous as Everest? To what extent are people responsible for one another in a dangerous situation? What is the moral imperative when survival is inherently threatened?

This book attempts to address some of these issues primarily by reporting on the events of the 2006, one of the deadliest seasons on the mountain. David Sharp, an individual climber, ended up incapacitated (but still alive) on the mountain, and numerous other climbers passed him on the way to the summit, but did not offer aid. Heil does a nice job of neutrally uncovering why that happened, the media storm that followed, and the people who were impacted. As part of his investigation, he also relates the story of Lincoln Hall, an experienced climber who experienced cerebral edema on his way down. These stories tie together in interesting ways.

The initial half of the book introduces the major characters and relates some of the history of climbing Mt. Everest, but it is really the second half of the book that is more gripping and that has more to say about the human condition. ( )

"The more I learned about the particulars surrounding Sharp's death, the less controversial it seemed to be."

This is the best summary I can find of this book, something that I very much agree with after reading. Before I had only briefly read about his death on Wikipedia which sort of just summed it up with "forty people walked by as he lay dying", and that ... might be true but it's also very much a simplification. There were people there trying to help, but it was too late, and it's not a place where it's easy to help.

The book in itself doesn't deal just with the Sharp case, and it gives backgrounds on lots of different climbers, which I really enjoyed. When you read about lots of mountaineering accidents or mountaineering in general, it's nice to get even just a little bit of insight as to what drives people to doing something they know could very well kill them.

It did not deal as much with David Sharp as I thought it would, but that was somewhat explained by the end, after mentioning how Sharp's parents did not want people to talk too much about him. This book seems like a good compromise, dealing with the circumstances around his death, but not getting too deep into his personal life. ( )

Another non-fiction book about mountaineering and specifically Everest. The blurb says this is about the 2006 season in which David Sharp lay dying near the top of Everest while forty other climbers walked past him on their way up or down to the summit. Not long after another experienced climber, Lincoln Hall was left for dead on the mountain. His death was widely reported but then he was found alive and rescued. I have a fairly keen interest in the kind of people who climb the highest mountains in the world so I knew the general story here but none of the gritty details. The blurb is a little misleading as the book starts with a general history of people climbing Everest and only later gets into the 2006 season. The synposis also misses an important point about Sharp which makes him being left on his own understandable, while at the same time being disgusting. Despite these reservations the book was an enjoyable read and is clearly very well researched. ( )

It was interestingly told story of the events that took place on Everest in 2006 but the structure was kinda off a bit. It was supposed to be the Lincoln Hall part of the story but still there were details told about David Sharp. Should have been more clearly structured. ( )

"But what tended to prompt the most intense discussion, beyond the course of action, beyond even the lurid spectacle of men and women suffering slow deaths at high altitude, was the suggestion that the modern circus on Everest had exposed something essential about who we are as human beings - an insight that reverberated among climbers and non-climbers alike. More specifically, the cavalcade of deaths during 2006 raised the highly uncomfortable possibility that, in fact, we are not all in this together - that we are simply the latest edition of a complex species tenuously drawn together into social systems that mask our genetic predilection towards selfishness and competition. The argument, followed to its logical conclusion, had less and less to do with climbing mountains and more to do with the foundations of human sociology, and it challenged some of our most cherished assumptions about the roots of compassion and altruism."

I am an armchair climber. I love mountaineering books. There seem to be so many of them now, as everyone wants to tell their side of what happened on Everest in the deadly 1996 and 2006 seasons. And this book doesn't shy away from the hard questions. Why do people climb Everest and other mountains at such great cost - not only monetarily but also in lives? Why do people fail to help their fellow man when mortal peril is so obvious?

I enjoyed it and if you're in to Everest literature, or curious about it, I would recommend it. ( )