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Named one of the "Five Adventure Books You Need to Read This Summer" by Backpacker MagazineFor readers of Into Thin Air, riveting high-altitude drama and the passion and drive that inspire outsized mountaineering achievements.Master of Thin Air opens with a fall that the author very nearly could not stop down an almost vertical rock ramp leading to a three-thousand-foot drop. The qualities that saved him then on K2 - in addition to his mountaineering know-how and sheer good luck - drove his sixteen-year journey to summit all of the world's eight-thousanders, the fourteen peaks that exceed 8,000 meters (26,000-plus feet) and take climbers into the death zone. Incredibly, he accomplished that feat without the aid of bottled oxygen for every mountain but one.