Into the Wild
by JON KRAKAUER
"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.
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. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable
story of Into the Wild.
Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed
through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his
heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his
car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He
would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered
by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered
experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless
simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister,
he vanished into the wild.
Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles
the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst
that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires
that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling
mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of
the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities
to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between
fathers and sons.
When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and
fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his
naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death
wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled
to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage
out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought
by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and
not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild
is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling
blaze through every page.
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