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Editorial Review:Product Description:This is the haunting story of 22-year-old Chris McCandless, who walked into the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992 and whose body--along with a camera with five rolls of film, an SOS note, and a cryptic diary written in the back pages of a book about edible plants--was found six months later by a hunter. Simultaneous hardcover release from Villard. 2 cassettes.
Amazon.com Review:"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.
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It's ok to be a dreamer. It's ok to want to 'find yourself.' It's really ok to hike and backpack. I've done it myself, but I would never, never enter a wilderness area without, at least, a topographical map. Chris McCandless' story is nothing short of tragic.
Jon Krakauer does a fine job of getting you into the mind of this doomed traveler while also taking you into the adventure and beauty of the wilderness.
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I'm saddened to see so many people writing with little or no compassion for Chris McCandless, and such a limited effort to understand his quest.
Most of us know what he was running from -- problems at home, a society struggling with issues of materialism and morality. But an understanding of what he was searching for -- inner peace, closeness with nature, a quiet and beautiful place in which to think -- eludes many of us, just as it eluded him.
It could be lovely, could ...
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Jon Krakauer, typewriter jockey, decided that in order to justify his wasted life to himself, that he would smear the image of such a beautiful human as the subject of this book, by writing a mocking, superficial account of something that he could never understand.
Instead of praising the kid's sense of adventure and compassion, he takes jabs at the kid for how "immature" and "thoughtless" he is ... well even though Krakauer's fat-a** is still sitting in cafes drinking lattes bought with ...
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Why would I read a book that basically tells me the plot and resolution of the book on the cover? Way to keep readers engaged with the summary of the novel on the cover. I knew what happened without even opening the book, and when I was forced to read it, I found it quite dull and pointless.
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That the force that is nature will ultimately change those of us who are enthralled by it. Its not surprising tht the protagnist in "Into the Wild" gives up so much to live primtively in the northern climes of Alaska .. its Thoreau revisited. The author never fails to please those who understand his messages.
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