Product Description

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter....

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-21
• Released on: 2007-08-21
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
What would possess a gifted young man recently graduated from college to literally walk away from his life? Noted outdoor writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer tackles that question in his reporting on Chris McCandless, whose emaciated body was found in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992.

Described by friends and relatives as smart, literate, compassionate, and funny, did McCandless simply read too much Thoreau and Jack London and lose sight of the dangers of heading into the wilderness alone? Krakauer, whose own adventures have taken him to the perilous heights of Everest, provides some answers by exploring the pull the outdoors, seductive yet often dangerous, has had on his own life.

From Publishers Weekly
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods. Maps. 35,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In April 1992, 23-year-old Chris McCandless hiked into the Alaska bush to "live off the land." Four months later, hunters found his emaciated corpse in an abandoned Fairbanks city bus, along with five rolls of film, an SOS note, and a diary written in a field guide to edible plants. Cut off from civilization, McCandless had starved to death. The young man's gruesome demise made headlines and haunted Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer, who saw "vague, unsettling parallels" between McCandless's life and his own. Expanding on his 1993 Outside article, Krakauer traces McCandless's last two years; after his graduation from Emory University, McCandless abandoned his middle-class family, identity, and possessions in favor of the life of "Alexander Supertramp," wandering the American West in search of "raw, transcendent experience." In trying to understand McCandless's behavior and the appeal that risky activities hold for young men, Krakauer examines his own adventurous youth. However, he never satisfactorily answers the question of whether McCandless was a noble, if misguided, idealist or a reckless narcissist who brought pain to his family. For popular outdoor and adventure collections.
--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A reasonably good read about a fool
The book as a work of literature is okay. I guess. It seems to meander about looking for something to say. In addition, I don't trust Krakauer as a chronicler, as it is my understanding that he played fast and loose with the facts in both "Into Thin Air" (to the fury of some of those who were there) and "Under the Banner of Heaven." My biggest problem with the book is that I found Chris McCandless to be a juvenile fool. Despite his alleged superior intellect, he behaved and wrote like a 14-year-old. I really see no reason for glorifying this idiot. His demise was nature's way of purifying the gene pool of a little lunacy.

Modern Day Vision Quest
Having loved the movie, and long put off reading the book (whose cover blurb sold me on it long before I knew of how well Krakauer wrote), I finally have read Into The Wild.

It is a life changing book, for me - a brilliant piece of work almost impossible to quantify for others, but I'll take a shot, briefly.

There are a lot of people (Alaskans, in particular) who resent the attention paid to Chris McCandless. He is considered by some to be an arrogant, and ill-prepared elite who had no sense at all to attempt what he accomplished. At the end of his great adventure he died, after all. As if that fact lays bare the nature and heart of what McCandless accomplished on his personal journey. The book spends a great deal of time addressing this attitude directly, and while everyone is all too aware of the errors and faults (some of which can be interpreted as arrogance, not using a map for instance), the author's impressions, research and conclusions tell a very different story.

This isn't about Alaska, or dying in Alaska. It is about our culture's detachment from honest, obvious and impacting rights of passage and how this natural need is bound to cost us the lives of some of our young - the ones daring enough to try to live life according to their own beliefs, passions and need for honest, truthful self discovery.

I shouldn't say what it is about, really. I've read many reviews and opinions wherein the writer gives their interpretation of 'what it is about' and accuse others of 'not getting it'. That is one of the beauties of this book - it is necessarily going to carry a different message to many different people.

Parents may face the cold reality that they do not ultimately control their children when they mature - and that the grey line between childhood and adulthood necessitates some dangerous transitions, if it is to benefit the adult in the making.

Mortality isn't something many in the West are comfortable with - to have died (whatever quality of life proceeds it) is the ultimate failure to many people. That this attitude prescribes a life of fear and limitation seems to escape most. Chris lived more life than many such people, and did so in 1/4 the time.

I'm predictably rambling and being less coherent than I'd like, so I'll start to close with a quote from the book:

"It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less that in most others. Danger always held a certain allure. That , in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme."

I feel that McCandless ultimately gave us a worthy example mixed perfectly with a cautionary tale, and the jewels he unearthed through hard work most of us would never dream of attempting. After all was said and done, he concluded "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED", an intensely powerful conclusion for someone to attain after leaving everyone else behind.

A good complement to a much better movie
It's rare that I'm motivated to both read a book and watch the same movie, but the Into the Wild movie was so impressive that I checked this book out from the library as well. It fills in a lot of additional information in the storyline, but also has a few major shortcomings.

It was impressive to see the book elaborate so much on the McCandless family's history. Krakauer went into much more detail in building up Walt and Billie as success stories in the American Dream, having both come up from working-class backgrounds in the West and Michigan respectively to run a lucrative consulting firm. At the same time, he emphasized their tragic flaws in detailing how they carried on an affair and had illegitimate children, then hid the truth from those children. I got the impression from both the book and the movie that there was a lot of self-centeredness and resentment around the household, both from Chris and from his parents. We didn't see much more from Carine, though; she was a narrator who tried to be fair to both parties in the movie, and also didn't seem to take much of a side in the book.

Chris himself was also filled in around the edges a lot in the book. The reader can see how his academic prowess came long before Emory, at Woodson High School--although his stubborn nature also did, as he had one F on his transcript in a physics class where he did not follow the format on lab reports. His political views are shown as conflicted, as many young, intellectually curious men and women are; his tending to the poor is supplanted with an unusual combination of founding (re-founding? Newt Gingrich was there once) the Emory College Republicans, railing against religious right leaders, and railing against "rich kids at Emory" in general (even if he was one himself.) It has been debated on here whether McCandless' foolishness was a sign of liberalism or conservatism, and whether Dennis Kucinich supporter Sean Penn was trying to prove a point about materialism and upper-class suburbia in the movie, but some of the answers are right there. McCandless is shown as emotionally distant, not much for human relationships or romance, and preferential of books over human friendship during his time at Emory, just as he was in the remaining two years of his life. His spartan lifestyle is also exposed, as he had a bare-bones living in his Atlanta apartment, without even a telephone. His trying relationship with his family is shown in even more detail; one has to wonder what led him to not have a potential "internship" with his parents' consulting firm during one of the summers that he instead drove across America the first time--an opportunity that would surely have helped him achieve his goals of attending Harvard Law School and becoming a great human rights attorney (not to mention he may have many more gaps of meaningful employment to explain from his final trip, had he returned alive.) It is intriguing that the book explains how he nearly blew his cover and revealed his whereabouts to his parents, and that we find out what happened to his washed-out car (it is used as a police car.)

Many of the characters he meets along the way--Ron Franz and the hippies, for instance--are carried almost verbatim from the book to the movie, and they are also executed well here. The book doesn't have Hal Holbrook delivering a phenomenal Franz performance, but it does allow the reader to emotionally connect with the minor characters, and sense their anxiety over Chris's abandonment of his family. The farms of South Dakota are also portrayed well, as Chris's work ethic in comparison to other wanderers is described in more detail. Much more detail is given to how poorly McCandless planned the Alaskan expedition, how he died, and how the natives of the state reacted (rightly and wrongly) to his blunders.

But the glaring flaw of the book is much of its midsection. There was absolutely no reason that it had to talk about many other travelers, whose circumstances were only tangentially related to McCandless' (or even Krakauer's.) Those chapters completely distracted from the book and added almost nothing to it.

However, due to the outstanding content of the rest of the book, which supplemented the content of the movie very well and both helped me loathe McCandless' disrespect for his family (as much as their own failings stood out) and his haphazard planning and execution of his trip, but also allowed me to identify a lot with his free spirit and intellectual nature, these chapters only subtract one star from an outstanding work.