The subtitle of Eiger Dreams is far more descriptive of the book than the main title is: Ventures Among Men and Mountains. That is really what Jon Krakauer’s book is about. The book Eiger Dreams is really a collection of different articles written by Jon Krakauer that he compiled together, covering the broad subject of mountaineering, and largely focusing on three different mountaineering areas: The Himalaya, Alaska, and the Alps. Overall, Jon Krakauer has written, what I think, is a pretty good and fun book to read on mountaineering.

Each chapter in the book is on something different. On some occasions, Krakauer writes about difficult mountains to climb, other times he writes about different places where climbing is a big part of the economy and history, and other times, he is writing about successful mountaineers. This makes the book feel like a survey of mountaineering then, the reader really gets a broad overview of what is happening in the world of mountaineering, and it really was written as a current events of sorts, published originally in 1990, a lot of the chapters appear to be have written in the mid to late-80s. By now, it is a little dated in that way, but it does give a good understanding of mountaineering during that decade then.

Of the different details of mountaineering in the 1980’s, the biggest that comes up in Eiger Dreams is the nature of the kind of people that have entered into the realm of mountaineering. One of the first mountaineers Krakauer introduces is a young man named Marc Twight, who Krakauer describes as, “sport[ing] two eerings in his left ear and a purple haircut that would do a punk rocker  proud. He is also a red-hot climber… He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun. (p. 4)” Really, this fits into a different and newer mold of climber, not the upper-middle class respectable but rather the counter-culture climber that is could be described as young, wild, and free. Krakauer describes a lot of climbers this way, like the Burgess brothers from the United Kingdom. When these two start climbing in 1975 Krakauer wrote, “That was the year they began to wander the globe in earnest, pubbing and brawling in the finest Whillans tradition. They were arrested in four countries, and reprimanded in many more. In Lima, Peru, they precipitated a slug-fest in a bordello after accusing the establishment of false advertising. In Talkeetna, Alaska, the locals are still peeved about the time the Burgesses and six British cronies absconded with thirty cases of beer from the Fairview bar and narrowly escaped going to jail. In the course of their travels, the twins also bagged route after harrowing route. (p. 135)” These kinds of people definitely would not have been the climber one would see during the Golden Age of Mountaineering, when climbers were sponsored by different nations. The climbers that Jon Krakauer meets are more similar to the “dirtbag” variety that climb just for the fun and thrill, and just get by when they are not climbing.

Jon Krakauer also does a very good job of describing different climbing communities that can be encountered in the mountaineering scene. Two that he describes well are Valdez, Alaska, and Chamonix, France. Valdez is an Alaskan town known partly for oil because of the supertankers that go there for the oil from the trans-Alaska pipeline, but Krakauer says that it is also known for the ice climbing that can be done in the winter. Ice climbing has become such a big deal in Valdez that their has been an annual Valdez Ice Climbing Festival every year since 1983 that draws in climbers from places as far as “Austria, New Zealand, Japan, and Kentucky. (p. 37)” While Valdez focuses on ice climbing, a small niche in the mountaineering community, Chamonix is quite a different and probably more well-known climbing community. Krakauer said of Chamonix that it, “has for two centuries been the hippest mountain community on the Continent, maybe the entire planet. (p. 89)” Chamonix largely became famous because of Mont Blanc and the other mountains close to it in the Alps, but it offers a lot for basically any extreme sport someone could think of, from skiing to ballule rolling, which is “careering downhill inside giant inflatable balls (p. 93).” Perhaps it is these kinds of communities that help to keep mountaineering more together and unified, even with all of the different niches and seemingly random sports one could take up within mountaineering. A lot of these communities are where climbers meet each other and build friendships that then bud out into actually climbing together and perpetuating the community.

Eiger Dreams is an easy book to read, and is actually quite good, especially Krakauer, I do not believe, writing like he does in Into Thin Air. Instead, Eiger Dream seems to focus on different aspects of mountaineering, and bringing to light some parts of mountaineering that probably are not as well known. The book never gets very contentious on anything either, more often than not, Krakauer is simply telling stories of his experiences in mountaineering, whether it is his time in climbing communities, his relationship with different climbers, or even his own personal experiences in mountaineering, from ice climbing to big mountain climbing, to canyoneering. He is just getting the stories out there, and definitely is not trying to paint mountaineering in a bad light. The closest he comes to that is when he speaks of how dangerous mountaineering can get, like when he writes of the 1986 summer climbing of K2, when thirteen people died, giving K2 a death ratio of one death for every two successful summits. Really, Eiger Dreams is just a fun and easy to read collection of mountaineering stories. I think that is what makes it so good, though, because it is just a collection of stories, Krakauer is just writing to tell people what he knows, and telling some pretty awesome stories through it. it really is just stories about “ventures among men and mountains.”