Into the Wild by
Jon Krakauer
List Price: $18.00
Editorial Reviews
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.