JANUARY 30, 2008
The depths of humanity at the top of the world
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 NONFICTION: High Crimes |
In 2006, the late Sir Edmund Hillary spoke of the mountain whose summit he was the first to reach a half-century earlier. “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt. Everest has become rather horrifying,” he said. “People just want to get to the top.” His words could serve as the thesis of Michael Kodas’s absorbing and disturbing new book about the business of Everest, High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed (available 2/5).
High Crimes chronicles the 2004 Everest season and attempts to uncover how a 69-year-old doctor named Nils Antezana died on the mountain after being abandoned near the summit by his guide and Sherpas. The Everest described by Kodas is an extreme theme park, a sort of globalized Wild West populated by unscrupulous characters whose guiding principles are amateurism (in the bad sense), thievery, egotism, and deadly greed.
In a sense, High Crimes picks up where Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air ended, exploring why another of Hillary’s observations has been so thoroughly ignored. “Human life,” he said, “is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.”
High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed (Hyperion; hardcover; 363 pages)
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