Eiger Dreams: Ventures among Men and Mountains

No one writes about mountaineering and its attendant hardships and victories more brilliantly than critically acclaimed author Jon Krakauer. In this collection of his finest work from such magazines as Outside and Smithsonian, he explores the subject from the unique and memorable perspective of one who has battled peaks like K2, Denali, Everest, and, of course, the Eiger. Always with a keen eye, an open heart, and a hunger for the ultimate experience, he gives us unerring portraits of the mountaineering experience.

Yet Eiger Dreams is more about people than about rock and ice—people with that odd, sometimes maniacal obsession with mountain summits that sets them apart from other men and women. Here we meet John Gill, climber not of great mountains but of house-sized boulders so hard to surmount that even demanding alpine climbs seem easy by comparison, and many more compelling and colorful characters.

Eiger Dreams is stirring, vivid writing about one of the most enthralling and dangerous of all human pursuits.

In this collection, Krakauer writes of mountains from the memorable perspective of one who has himself struggled with solo madness to scale Alaska's notorious Devil's Thumb.

Jon Krakauer is the author of the best-selling Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Into Thin Air, and is the editor of the Modern Library Exploration series. His writings have been published in Outside, GEO, Architecture Digest, Rolling Stone, TIME, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the National Geographic.