Into the Wild

This book, as are all Krakauer's books, is very well-written and very engrossing. The story of Christopher McCandless is one of an idealistic young twentysomething who leaves his life behind after graduating from college to become Alexander Supertramp, a wandering nomad on his way to Alaska for a great adventure.

Except he was stupid. Now, Krakauer makes a huge deal about how smart, how intellectual McCandless was. How big of a reader he was. How animated, how intelligent, how engaging he was. He touched a lot of lives on his adventures across America; he made friends.

But he didn't get it. The boy repeatedly picked up and left, leaving people and places behind without much of a care in the world as to what his departure meant to those show more he was leaving; what his absence meant to his ever-worrying family; what his not being there meant to the sister that he supposedly cared so deeply for, but didn't bother contacting even once during his travels. If anything he was naive and selfish, and blind to the effect he had on others, willfully or not.

But what gets me about this book is how determined Krakauer is to compare himself to McCandless. He devotes a few chapters to creating parallels to himself and McCandless, insisting that he was that same headstrong boy in his twenties. But he missed out on one big, huge detail: he survived his twenties, and he did it because he knew what he was doing. He took maps. He took gear. He didn't just look at a vast, open wilderness and start walking. He planned.

McCandless didn't, and it got him killed. It's said repeatedly, in the book, in the news articles, and in the movie -- had McCandless simply taken a map with him, he'd have known about nearby cabins. He'd have known about a river crossing. He'd have known he wasn't nearly as far into the wilderness as he'd come to believe he was. He'd likely have survived the entire ordeal. And yet.

The book itself is fantastic. It's engrossing, it's well-written, and it gives you a pretty damn good look into McCandless's short life. It certainly tries to make him into a hero, an American rambling man -- but for me it fell short in that regard, trying to make McCandless out to be a whale when really, he was simply a fish. show less

This is Jon Krakauer's famous study of Chris "Alex" McCandless, a young man who rejected his wealthy family and much of civilization in general in favor of a life on the road and in the wilderness. In 1992, he realized his ultimate goal of retreating to the Alaskan wild to live off the land, only to die of starvation there a few months later.

It's a sensitive examination of a complex life and an unfortunate death. And while Krakauer writes with real sympathy for McCandless, he leaves it very much up to the reader to form their own option of the guy. Was he a naive, reckless dumbass with more fancy philosophical thoughts than common sense, who had no business being where he was, as under-prepared as he was? Or was he a smart, sensitive, show more thoughtful guy carrying on a long tradition of seeking personal insight through contact with the wild, who died more because he was unlucky than because he was dumb or arrogant? Or was he both? Me, I think I'm going to go with both, but it's a surprisingly complex and thought-provoking question to ponder.

And Krakauer's writing as he invites us to ponder these things is good. He jumps back and forth from time to time and topic to topic: re-tracing McCandless's steps on his journey, filling in his backstory, discussing other people who disappeared in the wilderness in similar ways, even recounting a story from Krakauer's own youth that he feels gives him some insight into McCandless's thinking. All of this hopping around could easily have become confusing or mildly annoying, but somehow it instead works very well. And Krakauer has an excellent instinct for when to offer up his own thoughts and relevant experiences, and when to remove himself from the story and let his subject matter speak for itself. show less

A fascinating account of Chris "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless who walked into the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992 and died of starvation approximately 100 days later. Krakauer interweaves Chris' story, the stories of other well-known adventuring loners, and his own story of time spent in the wilds of Alaska. He creates a surprisingly complete picture from the small amount of information and sources available to him, and presents a complex portrait of a young man who was idealistic and naive, arrogant and self-conscious, and brave in the face of hardship but frightened of personal connections. Some internetting after I finished listening to the book revealed that there was yet more to the story and that people were still show more drawn to it. I know I won't forget it any time soon. show less

Stories about eccentrics who live in isolation, consciously seek out the wild, and hold extremely radical views on humanity and society are usually not my thing. You find them in all countries and regions, but for some reason most often in the United States. Is it the extreme cult of the free individual, the cultivated hatred of everything related to government and regulation, the lack of proper education, etc.? I know, this strongly smacks of one-sided prejudice on my part, but it is noticeable.
Nevertheless, this book, about an overconfident young man found dead in 1992 in a remote area of Alaska, did appeal to me. This is mainly because Jon Krakauer has made it an honest quest to discover what exactly motivated Chris McCandles to show more isolate himself and go to extremes in an attempt to live entirely on his own and with few resources, dependent on nature itself, in an area generally considered unhabitable. Krakauer has turned it an attempt to reconstruct not only McCandles' physical journey, but especially his mental trajectory. He does so with a critical eye and respect, but also, interwoven, a certain admiration and fascination for a highly gifted young man who made such a radical life choice. A brilliant book. show less

5!!! A stunning piece of narrative nonfiction that refuses to let you look away from a young man’s longing, his pride, and the brutal beauty of the stories we tell ourselves about freedom.
The premise is simple and already infamous. Christopher McCandless, fresh out of college, sheds his old life, takes the name Alexander Supertramp, drifts through the West, and heads for Alaska with a near religious hunger for purity. He is found dead months later. Krakauer treats it like a mystery, but also like a question aimed straight at the reader: what, exactly, was he trying to outrun.
What makes this book unputdownable is that Krakauer does not flatten McCandless into either martyr or idiot. He lets him be brilliant and naive, tender and show more stubborn, generous and self mythologizing, sometimes in the same breath. The portrait is built from letters, interviews, and the small trail of impressions McCandless left on strangers, which means you feel the ache of him as a presence more than a person. That distance becomes its own kind of truth. This is a book about the way charisma can be accidental, the way conviction can look like cruelty to the people who love you, and the way a certain American masculinity confuses suffering with meaning.
Krakauer’s real subject is yearning, but he is honest about the costs. The wilderness here is not a motivational poster. It is indifferent, gorgeous, and lethal. The father son tension running beneath the narrative lands hard, not as a tidy explanation, but as a pressure system that shapes everything McCandless touches, including his refusal to accept help, his need to prove something unnamed, his appetite for extremity. show less

If this hadn't been chosen by my book club, I wouldn't have finished it. Blame my bias on the subject material. I don't considerable Chris McCandless and his journey to be noble, I consider them foolhardy examples of the arrogance of youth that didn't warrant a book and a movie. It doesn't help that I was reading this book while hearing news stories of all of the people in the Texas area needing rescue after ignoring mandatory evacuation orders. Going into a treacherious natural situation inadequately prepared (physically or mentally) is stupid, not noble.

We are all heroes to ourselves. McCandless was, Krakauer is. This doesn't vary. All that varies is how we define heroism and how much, or how little, we are prepared to do to for that stance.

In order to get people, usually young men, to sacrifice their lives we tell them of those that went before and tell them they were heroes who died for their countries, died for their principles, died even for their dreams. Impractical dreams that are the province of the young. And those who would be heroes never concern themselves with the practical, that is far too mundane, it is for others to take care of those details.

McCandless' dream of heroism was to survive entirely alone and entirely off the land at the ends of the earth. It didn't include show more the practicality of learning about the wild foods he might forage in that area, or how he might survive in extreme weather conditions, or even exactly where his place of solitude was situated so that when he sought succour at the end, he didn't even know how close it really was.

The final photograph he took of himself is of a wasted face, gaunt but beautiful with the shining eyes of one who has lived his dream and is satisfied. Then he died. show less