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What: The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt, St. Martin’s Press, $24.95.

The tragedy of multiple deaths near the summit of Mount Everest on May 10, 1996 became mountain climbing lore with the publishing of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.”

For one person involved in that terrible day on the roof of the world, Krakauer’s version cried out for corrections and elaboration. That one person was Russian expedition guide Boukreev, whom Krakauer had portrayed as a somewhat shadowy figure in what happened that fateful day.

Krakauer, who reached the summit successfully on that May 10 and barely got down to the safety of a lower camp before a deadly storm hit, wrote that Boukreev, one of the first to the top, came back down too fast and without tending to some of the duties normally tended to by the guides. The implication was that Boukreev was taking care of himself, when he was being paid to take care of others, the clients paying as much as $65,000 to be guided to the top by the Scott Fischer Mountain Madness expedition.

Boukreev’s book, while not nearly as well-written or smoothly executed as Krakauer’s, does round out the picture and fill in some blanks about what happened on that day. Without reading Krakauer first, Boukreev’s book would be just another choppy tale of man beats nature, something that would be attractive mainly to a couple of hundred people in Seattle and Portland whose lives are only in sync when they are above 7,000 meters. But read after Krakauer’s, the picture of that day on Everest takes on better focus.

In 1997, Boukreev guided an Indonesian expedition to the summit of Everest and left a memorial flag near the remains of Fischer, one of those who died in ’96. Writing near the end of the book about that, Boukreev says, “I accept that I may die in the mountains.”

Christmas Day, 1997, he did, during an avalanche on Mt. Annapurna in Nepal.