Well, they can’t all be winners. Despite all the superlatives on the front and back cover claiming that this work was the equivalent of a new “Into Thin Air” which recapped a first hand perspective of a climbing disaster on Everest about 15 years before the events taking place in this book, its really not even close.
The largest issue here is that the author was not present on K2 during these events as Jon Krakauer was on Everest. Nor is the author here in Graham Bowley, an actual climber. Both factors result in a very dry work. This is a newspaper recap of events gathered second hand from interviews weeks and months after the event. Bowley doesn’t know the difficulties of operating at altitude, the cold and wind of the high peaks, the gasping for breath in thin air, the smell of yak dung fires or the taste of warm goat milk.
The whole work comes off very antiseptic. That doesn’t mean the work is incorrect or wrong. It may very well have recapped the order of events and described disputed decisions appropriately. It just doesn’t carry the emotion and rawness of being there the way “Into Thin Air” does. Further, while Krakauer has an obvious skill at “investigatory” writing—deeply researching a topic, covering events, drawing reasonable conclusions as he has done over and over in his writing career (see “Into the Wild”, “Under the Banner of Heaven”, “Where Men Win Glory”, etc.) Bowley doesn’t have that. It certainly doesn’t feel like he has a deep understanding of the history of K2 and its climbers or feel like he knows what its like to travel from Lahore to K2 basecamp. Instead it comes across as he has been airdropped into the events to cover them at a superficial level providing the who, what, where, when (but not the why) of the events. That he does. Its simply doesn’t carry the emotion or interest that such events in the hands of a more capable writer would bring.