Into the Wild

Product Details

NonfictionLarge Print Edition* A New York Times BestsellerIn April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given ,000 in savings to a charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and invented a life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. Jon Krakauer brings Chris McCandlesss uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows and illuminates it with meaning in this mesmerizing and heartbreaking tour de force.





"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.

Customer Reviews ::

Poorly written and biased - Melissa L. Stephens - Spokane, WA
One of the many reasons I disliked this book was because of the biased way Krakauer wrote about Chris McCandless. Throughout a lot of the book, he would say something along the lines of "This could have befallen Chris" or "-so-and-so- made all these silly mistakes" and then follow it up with "But of course, Chris was far too driven/smart/courageous/perfect for this to happen to him." He glorified a boy who shouldn't have been glorified. The parallels he drew were poor, and he always seemed to be making excuses for Chris' ignorance or stupidity.

He also completely ignored any of the bad aspects of Chris' "odyssey" - the people he hurt, the laws he broke, and the contradictions between what he complained about and what he did. I'm sure he - and Krakauer himself - was supposed to come across as a boy with all the right ideas who was smart enough to do what he wanted, but what I got from it was an ignorant, arrogant boy who thought he could tame the Alaskan "wilderness" - though he scorned "the burgeois trappings of mainstream America" - without any regard to anyone or anything besides himself.

Terrible story, and a terrible book.