Krakauer

[SeattleUte]

I regard "Into Thin Air" as a contemporary classic. It brings to my mind "Moby-Dick," the story of the Titanic, "The Old Man and the Sea" and similar tales of man pitted against nature and all we have understood her to stand for, and nature finally rising up and striking a fatal blow just when man, in his hubris, thinks he's finally tamed her. Krakauer's specialty is describing nature, and he does it well in this book. His character sketches dramatize the tragedy as well as any novel could. One of my favorite is of the Texas surgeon who is given up for dead, gets up and wanders off in the squal, and miraculously reapears in camp like an abominable snowman, and survives (albeit missing a few digits and facial extremities). I think he tastefully and appropriately deals with his own role in the tragedy, a tall order for any writer.

So I was particularly chagrined at how poorly conceived and executed was "Under the Banner of Heaven." It contained nothing original, shamelessly digressed to ensure a book length work, didn't improve on the presentation of the old material, and its central thesis was a stretch. Some Mormons must really have been unkind to him when he was a kid.