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| High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Kodas
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $7.98
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New (34) Used (24) Collectible (1) from $7.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 97359
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1401302734
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.522
EAN: 9781401302733
ASIN: 1401302734
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ship the next day
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Product Description
In the years following the publication of Into Thin Air, much has changed on Mount Everest. Among all the books documenting the glorious adventures in mountains around the world, and the unique perils and challenges of Mount Everest, none details how the recent infusion of wealth into the mountains is reacting with the age-old lust for glory to draw crime to the highest places on the planet, how a mountain's ability to reduce climbers to their essential selves is revealing villains as well as heroes, greed as well as selflessness. The change is caused both by a tremendous boom in traffic to the world's mountains and a new class of parasitic and predatory adventurer. Some of the stories included in the book are the tragic story of Nils Antezana, a climber who died on Everest after he was abandoned by his guide, and the author's own summit story, as he participated in the Connecticut Everest Expedition, which would never have followed George Dijjmarescu and Lhakpa Sherpa to the Himalaya had news of the couple's climb with the Romanian team the previous year made it to the United States. But as they neared the frigid peril of Everest, the charming couple turned increasingly hostile. Women on the team held little power and were instead threatened, stalked, and harassed before a final assault. Those that tried to stand against the violence, theft and intimidation found the worst of the peril they encountered on Everest had followed them home to Connecticut. Beatings, thefts, drugs, prostitution, coercion, threats, and abandonment on the highest slopes of Everest and other mountains have become the rule rather than the exception, and Kodas describes many of these experiences and explores the larger issues these stories raise with thriller-like intensity.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 High altitude attitude February 14, 2008
22 out of 25 found this review helpful
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.
 Some serious problems with this book February 15, 2008
20 out of 31 found this review helpful
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.
Interesting, but not straightforward February 21, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
I have been interested in the phenomenon of persons obsessed to the verge of death with climbing Mount Everest since I first read Jon Krakauer's excellent "Into Thin Air" about the disastrous 1996 climbing season. Michael Kodas's "High Crimes" is a look at the dishonesty and outright criminal behavior infesting Everest-climbing in more recent times. The book's chronology, focusing on 2004 and 2006, is more than a little confusing, and I could wish that the author had taken a more straightforward (chronologically speaking) approach. Nevertheless, the book offers an enthralling, if somewhat disheartening, look at the seamy side of scaling the world's tallest mountain.
 A stellar thesis bogged down by the author's own personal tale March 3, 2008
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
High Crimes tells two narratives: (1) journalist Michael Kodas's Everest summit journey and (2) a separate, concurrent summit bid in which an elderly climber was led to this death by a sociopathic, inexperienced, freeloading guide. Kodas combines these two experiences to make his case that Everest is a modern day cesspit of greed, crime, and man-made disaster waiting to happen at every turn.
Kodas makes many valid claims about the conditions on Everest. Sickness isn't always caused by nature - now fistfights and STDs are prime reasons for visits to the medical tent. Climbers are pushing themselves with performance enhancing drugs, or cutting costs and equipment to the minimum and assuming other climbers will bail them out in a pinch. Theft is rampant, and unscrupulous businessmen sell unfit oxygen tanks, putting climbers in peril when they gamble their life on their tank in a final summit bid.
In Kodas's own experience, he ran across teammates willing to steal or lie to get ahead as well as a cheapskate guide who shirked responsibility and sponged off others. The weakest parts of the book arise in Kodas's descriptions of his own adventure, however. He airs a laundry list of gripes about every trifle of a disagreement on the team. The team engaged in back-and-forth spats via their blogs, and Kodas was clearly hurt that "their side" got published first, or more believably, in his opinion. He uses his book to set the record straight on every single detail, bogging down an otherwise gripping multi-faceted adventure story.
High Crimes is worth it for the story of Dr. Nils Antazana alone. Antazana, a skilled but older climber, fell prey to a con man of a "guide" who abandoned the doctor for dead and used his money and equipment for a personal summit bid. The story, which is told piecemeal throughout the entire text of High Crimes, reinforces the lawless frontier picture Kodas paints of the Everest base camp and man-eat-man world of the slopes.
Eye-opener February 16, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
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!
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