I was looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, it failed to live up to expectations.

The writing is very disorganized and jumps around from place to place and year to year for no apparent reason. Essentially, the lesson seems to be that there are some unpleasant people who climb Everest, and some of them may not be completely honest. People die, mostly because they make the mistake of trusting in guides who are not the best. (I would think the principle of caveat emptor applies here. The buyer should carefully check the credentials of people into whose hands he/she is placing their safety).

The book touches on (but does not go into depth about) some troubling moral issues. What responsibility does one have to a fellow climber? Should a climber put his/her own life in jeopardy in an attempt to save the life of another?

If you want to spend a few hours in the company of some very disagreeable people, then read this book.

Having been fascinated with Everest, and having read other books on the subject, I found this book intriguing. The details in the descriptions on the procedures leading up to, then getting to and climbing the mountain had me glued. I was drawn into the dramas of the interweaving stories and did not find the book fragmented, as one reviewer said. There seemed to be a lot of corroborating evidence for the author's interpretation and I also didn't think the perspective to be sour grapes, as another reviewer suggested. Further, I found the details, such as the descriptions of counterfeit oxygen equipment, informative. The book possibly could have been streamlined a bit, as there were a couple of repetative sections. However, in all, I was glued, read it straight through in a couple of days, and was sorry when it ended! Due to all the difficulties encountered, I was cured of any longing to go to Everest, but loved reading about it!

The beginning of this book was very interesting but as I went on I found
some serious problems with it.

One - the guy actually wanted to get to the top and did not succeed, the book took the flavor of "sour grapes" quite early.

Two - the author was a part of the conflict with his guide (this George D. guy) and so the author explained his side of the story. So, it was not an objective journalist reporting a conflict between a client and a guide and trying to understand the bigger picture, but a disgruntled client who uses the fact that he is a journalist in his favor to discredit his guide.
Towards the middle of the book the author becomes quite paranoic which became quite annoying to me actually. Towards the end of the book
there weren't too many likeable characters left in the story.

I am an amateur climber who climbs only in his local mountains (California). In the past 15 years I have seen a lot of funky business -
guides, clients, independents and what not. The topics of commercialization of the mountains and ethics in the mountains are very important for anybody who loves them but this book did not do them
justice.

The one question - at which point can you desert another man on the mountain to save your own life is so, so complicated...

Anyways, two books on similar topics that actually show the two different
sides of the story are the Krakauer book about 1996 and the book by one
of the guides in the same expedition V. Bukreev "The Climb"
Much, much better books even if (exactly because) they show two opposing points of view.

Anyways, it was worth reading probably but not worth buying - should
have gotten it from the library.

After reading this book, it's clear the armchair adventurers who have always dreamed of Everest should perhaps concentrate on more pedestrian, less-life-threatening pursuits - say, helicopter skiing, or extreme whitewater rafting; even high-altitude hang-gliding. Mountain climbing would appear, in this day and age, to be fit only for canny professionals. Tyros need not apply, on pain, literally, of death.

I heard the author of this book, Michael Kodas, being interviewed on National Public Radio, a lightning rod for me in deciding on literary works; if NPR thinks it's worthy of note, then I usually will read whatever book is being discussed. It helped that the author seemed well-informed, at pains to be fair to all concerned, even restrained in his answers; it intrigued me all the more. I can't recall the last time I bought a book, hardbound, right at publication. This was a worthy read.

I will never understand what it is that drives people to WANT to crawl up the face of a mountain, literally hanging in space, aware that they are courting frostbite, storms, failure, and death, from the capricious mountain they yearn to conquer. As it turns out, the mountain - Everest - is almost the least of their worries.

Michael Kodas, a journalist for the Hartford Courant, and several other Connecticut people collaborate with a successful climber of Everest to make an attempt at the summit of the one mountain every mountaineer hungers to put on their resume. None of them, apparently, are rank amateurs; the nominal leaders of the party have achieved the summit several times already. But what they are all totally unaware of is the level of humanity to which the base camps has stooped in the past twenty years.

The book chronicles two parallel climbs, on opposite sides of the mountain; Mr Kodas's party, and another party fully funded by a wealthy transplanted Bolivian doctor from the Washington, DC area. There is pure tragedy in the doctor's party; he has hired a guide whose credentials he trusts, who turns out to be the lowest sort of glory hound. Mr Kodas's party, not even starting out with all members on a level footing, descends into a bickering, acrimonious mess, with saboutage, missing equipment, and cruelty thrown into the mix.

Apparently it has devolved into an every-man-for-himself mindset on Everest over the years. The climbers - who, just because they can afford to climb, doesn't mean they should - are the chief source of revenue for the Sherpas who are native to the area, and those poor people can perhaps be somewhat forgiven in taking what advantage they are offered by the advent of a lot of ill-prepared, difficult-to-deal-with Westerners, whose whole goal is summit. The stories of them routinely bypassing dying climbers who might, with intervention, be saved, chilled me to the bone. Theft of gear and saboutage of equipment are rampant. The most chilling story in the book was of a climber, having achieved the summit, rappelling down to one of the camps and looking behind him just in time to see that the rappel rope ends just below where he is, over a fearsome void; the rest, along with the anchors, has been stolen. His perilous primitive climb down the rest of the route gave me goose pimples.

Most of the book seesaws between the tale of the doctor, left to die by an unscrupulous guide, and the doctor's daughter's subsequent and dogged efforts to discredit the guide out of ever doing the same thing to someone else; and Mr Kodas's trials with the fractious and foreboding leader of his expedition. I really think I would have left far sooner than Mr Kodas; the leader sounds unhinged at best, and at worst downright criminal, threatening the lives of those in disagreement with him, not to mention throwing in some domestic abuse, as he assaults his wife in front of everybody. The Base Camps on Everest would appear to be very unpleasant places, no better than the

It might be tempting to dismiss Michael Kodas as a guy with an Ice Ax to grind, but don't. High Crimes thoughtfully examines two main events; the tragedy that befalls Nils Antezana, as well as the nastiness that plays out during Kodas' own expedition to Everest.

In the story of Dr. Antezana, I suspect that Kodas is trying not only to set the record straight, but also seek some sort of justice (my opinion, of course) for another needless death on the mountain. One cannot remain unmoved given the events that unfold.

Be prepared to take some notes, since the timeline got confusing (as noted in a previous review).

As a climber, I tend to shy away from these kinds of books. Often, they are too self-serving to really be informative, but Kodas is trying to capture and come to grips with what went wrong and why. In this way, High Crimes is comparable to Krakauer's, Into Thin Air. Both Kodas and Krakauer elevate the 'climbing book' genre to something deeply more affecting, and I just couldn't put it down.