Word: krakauer
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When Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air came out in 1997--within a month of each other, as it happened--we rediscovered the joy of reading about very bad things happening to real people, preferably in exotic locales. Maybe it's because we never feel quite so warm and comfy in our poolside deck chairs, fruity cocktail in hand, as when we're reading a true-life yarn about somebody else drowning or freezing to death or doing both simultaneously...
...construction worker named Ron Lafferty received a message from God instructing him to kill his brother's wife Brenda and her 15-month-old baby Erica. Four months later, Ron--with the help of another brother, Dan--carried out his divine assignment with a 10-in. boning knife. Jon Krakauer tells the story of the Lafferty brothers in Under the Banner of Heaven (Doubleday; 372 pages...
True crime isn't really Krakauer's beat--he's the author of Into Thin Air, the bestselling account of a disastrous Everest expedition--but he takes an able, earnest stab at it. It turns out that Ron and Dan weren't just plain crazy. They were members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, and Krakauer spends much of the book putting their crime in the context of the strange and violent history of the Mormon Church...
Like a lot of popular nonfiction, Heaven belongs to the school of the lurid glimpse, giving readers an anthropological peep at a genuine subculture. But Krakauer never succeeds in getting inside his villains' heads--they're just a pair of holy robots obeying the evil software of their deity--and his main theme, that "there is a dark side to religious devotion," isn't exactly breaking news in 2003. If nothing else, the book is a bracing reminder that Americans aren't special. We're as capable of breeding violent religious fanatics as anybody else. --By Lev Grossman
...Oxygen deprivation does strange things to the human body. Heart rates go haywire, brain function decreases, blood thickens, intestines shut down. Bad ideas inexplicably pop into your head, especially above 25,000 ft., where, as Krakauer famously wrote in Into Thin Air, climbers have the "mind of a reptile...