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What: Into Thin Air, nonfiction by Jon Krakauer

Price: $24.95 (Villard)

In the spring of 1996, a record number of people, 12, died trying to get to, or down from, the 29,028-foot summit of Mount Everest.

Author Jon Krakauer, well known for his writings in Outside Magazine, was one of 84 who reached the summit. He was also one who lived to tell about it, and that’s fortunate for those who love to read about--and experience vicariously--logic-defying, mind-boggling attempts to push the envelope of human life. One difference between Krakauer’s account of the tragedy on Everest, and so many other books about the same topic and the same types of tragedy at extreme altitude, is that it tells the story with feeling. It has soul, it describes the loss and also agonizes over it. To Krakauer, these were people, not a bunch of robots, moving slowly toward some distant peak in heavy ski jackets and climbing boots. Krakauer puts faces on the robots, and hearts under their ribs.

Another difference is that this book allows readers who have never done such a thing to climb along without being bogged down in pitons and jumors and ropes. It is clear that getting to the top of Everest is not a leisurely stroll along a gradual incline, but you don’t need to have spent half your life in mountaineering school to understand what was going on.

When Krakauer finishes with his story, you have a sense of spending some rewarding hours with people driven well beyond the norm, people who would risk everything to stand on ground as high as the normal jet’s cruising altitude, and do so mostly just to say that they had done so.

There is a sort of understandable insanity there. They climb because “it is there.” Fortunately, for those wanting to experience this only through words, at sea level, in a warm easy chair, Krakauer was there and lived to tell about it.