High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars | 482 ratings

Price: 17.05

Last update: 08-12-2024


Top reviews from the United States

Flight Risk (The Gypsy Moth)
5.0 out of 5 stars High altitude attitude
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2008
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 Wild West of the 1880s; and Mr Kodas does a good job of demystifying Kathmandu as well, a place I had long held in my mind as full of peace, harmony, and followers of the Dalai Lama, and which instead appears to be little better than a grimy little border town on the frontier.

I do not read books very fast, but I zipped through this one; someone else commented that they had a hard time remembering who was who, but if you keep in mind what storyline you are following - aside from the very interesting side stories, of which there are many - it isn't hard; and this is a heckuva good read.
Rodney J. Szasz
4.0 out of 5 stars Stay Home, There's More Wild In Your Backyard than on Everest
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2010
Very depressing read. I cannot concur on the expeditions, but the amount of people heading into Everest, their total disregard for the environment and their supreme egos make even being around the area from Namche into Everest a very unpleasant experience.

If it were not for the views and the wonderous mountains I think one would do better to climb more isolated mountains with fewer groups, less garbage closer to home. I wouldn't even want to be around most of the unbounded egos described in this book. Seems to defy the very notion of why one mountaineers in the first place.

Having been the Himalayas a few times over the past 20 yrs I was immediately struck by the fact that the carrying capacity of environment is out of balance with the number of people there. It has reached the point where you are seriously hindered by large groups of tourists with their own agenda and their own egos to assuage. At times I have stood beside the trail into Everest base camp and had to wait 30 minutes for the crowd of German tourists to pass by me.

The attitudes are a problem as well. Mr. Kodas describes the cold egotistical distance that surrounds some camps, literally camped beside one another, yet who do not talk to each other. This state of affairs extends to the mountain where common courtesy is ground into the dust as the desire for profit for the expeditions and the desire for a fully placated ego for the new urban-corporate-sports-gym climber dominate the mountain. Greed. Money and sex are never far beneath the service as Kodas relates.

I personally could relate to the attitudes of some of the people Kordas describes. I will never forget the lady we deemed the "Canadian Cow" from Montreal, who severely reproached me for washing a child's parasitic wounds with soap and then bandaging her legs, giving her teh soap and telling her to wash regularly.... "ohhhh, you shouldn't do that with them, it just encourages them... besides, who knows... they might have HIV" (???!!). Needless to say, this spirit of outright meanness is not only profoudly depressing, but seems, according to Kordas, to be getting worse and worse.

Everest is still the highest, but there are greater challenges in the outback of Australia, or the nether reaches of so many unclimbed peaks of Canada, or Russia or South America or other places in the Himalayas... but no longer on Everest.

Very nice book, but depressing at places.

Best Sellers in

 
 

The Heart Is the Strongest Muscle: Know Your Why and Take Your Mindset from Great to Unstoppable

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 159
13.78
 
 

Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map (Patagonia)

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 463
17.72
 
 

Kill the Unicorn

0 0 out of 5 stars 0
11.99
 
 

The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 897
30.7
 
 

Leading with the Heart

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 839
10.22
 
 

Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 420
17.71
 
 

Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 759
17.71
 
 

Dynamic Drive: The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success

5 5 out of 5 stars 19
19.1