David Stuart Roberts, the renowned mountaineer and author of 32 widely admired books, died on August 20, 2021 of emphysema resulting from throat cancer. I met him in 1972 when I enrolled at Hampshire College, where he was a professor of English and the director of the Outdoors Program. We…

In 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, McChrystal was summoned to the U.S. Senate to be grilled by the Armed Services Committee. Although he was regarded as an innovative and uncommonly effective leader, McChrystal was expected to face…

A true story of violent faith — While I was growing up in Corvallis, Oregon, religion was pretty much absent from my life. My mother was descended from protestant Scandinavians, occasionally attended services at the Unitarian Fellowship, and seemed to believe in of some sort of god, but she didn’t talk about it. …

A report from Nepal — Nepal is an astonishing country. A visit there might change your life, but the boundless poverty is likely to break your heart. The misery of the poorest Nepalis, moreover, is often compounded by predators who enrich themselves by exploiting their most vulnerable compatriots. …

The Odyssey of Pat Tillman — PROLOGUE If David Uthlaut was still angry when the convoy finally rolled out of Magarah, Afghanistan, the young lieutenant kept his emotions hidden from the forty-four Army Rangers under his command. Certainly he had reason to be steamed. For the previous six hours his platoon had been stopped in the…

147 years ago in a tiny Louisiana town, white supremacists committed mass murder. The aftershocks of this despicable crime are still being felt today. By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer An hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, Louisiana, a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. …

Written as an afterword to the 1999 edition of my book about the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, here is my response to the allegations made by Anatoli Boukreev in his book, “The Climb” In November 1997 a book titled The Climb arrived in bookstores — Anatoli Boukreev’s account of the 1996 Everest disaster, written by an American named G. Weston DeWalt. It was fascinating, for me, to read about the events of 1996 from Boukreev’s perspective. Parts of the book were powerfully told…

A book by Chris McCandless’ sister reveals long-buried secrets that explain why the protagonist of “Into the Wild” ditched his family and lit out for the Territory —

Eighty-five percent of sexual assaults are committed by an acquaintance of the victim. Friends and family of the assailant almost always insist ‘he’s a nice guy who would never rape anyone.’ This doesn’t make the crime any less horrific for the person he has raped — In 2016, a Stanford University student-athlete named Brock Turner was convicted of felonly sexual assault for raping an unconscious 22-year-old woman next to a dumpster on the Stanford campus. Outrageously, he was sentenced to just six months in jail followed by three years of probation. …