Telling Your Own Story

Both ">before I went to Alaska and while I was there, I read and re-read a ton of Jon Krakauer this summer, and this weekend, I stumbled on an old copy of Under the Banner of Heaven, and started re-reading it. It's got a lot of the reporting that Krakauer's good at, but it strikes me as a substantially worse book than any of his adventure or wilderness writing. I think he wants to make the argument that Mormonism has violent tendencies, which is both theologically and historically unsubtle as an argument, and ignores a lot of religious scholarship and context about religious evolution. But more than that, I think it's a book that doesn't work because Krakauer doesn't have personal experience he can draw on in a useful way.

He's definitely the rare author where I think something personal always has to be there. But he's most valuable as a writer when he's getting us in touch with emotions that most of us will never have: the extreme aesceticism that leads someone to try to live off the land in Alaska, the need to try to climb the world's tallest mountains, the experience of having oxygen deprivation and learning that people you've spent weeks with are freezing to death around you, some of them perhaps dying because you didn't have the physical and mental capacity to help them. But I don't think it's that original to tell us that some people think Mormonism is a little, or extremely, odd. I think I read the book after I'd made a first good Mormon friend, and I remember at the time thinking how little Krakauer had to add to the larger argument over Mormonism's role in American society, no matter how good his reporting was.

Had anyone read his book on Pat Tillman? That strikes me as more in keeping with his understanding of extreme activity and manhood, but I'd like to know if folks think it's good before I give it a shot.