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....
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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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 Into the wild review
This book was okay it wasn't all that great, but if you like an autobiography then this is the book for you.
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 Hubristic fool ( sconnelly12 )
Unfortunately, I find this to be one of the most idiotic stories I have ever read. It is the story of a young man with no respect for the enormity of nature. His story is akin to waiting on a beach to watch a category 5 hurricane make landfall. I feel sorry for Chris' family
I love Krakauer's other books.
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 Into the Wild
this is the story of chris mccandles. candles inherits money, then lights it on fire out of principle. he then travels the country excoriating people for not doing the same. in between stints working at mcdonalds, he ventures off into the wild with nothing but a gun and fishing pole. after almost dying repeatedly, he decides alaska is the only wilderness tough enough for him. he walks down a trail off the highway, wades across a stream, then starts writing a journal. he gets hungry and decides to go back, but is blocked by the ice-melt swollen stream. not realizing that getting upriver to a crossing point is now a matter of life or death, he goes back to his campground. something very bad then happens to him and he can't get out. the best parts of the book are the several chilling accounts of how seemingly innocuous mistakes cost some very tough people their lives all alone in the wilderness. the author will make you feel like you're about to die, that's how well written it is.
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Evading the threat of human intimacy in immoderation ( duibuqi )
After watching and liking Sean Penn's movie version of this story, I didn't think I needed to read the book. My daughter told me otherwise. She said, the book has things that are missing in the film. And the book idolizes the hero less than the film does. She is right.
Krakauer was first hired by an outdoors magazine to write an article about the death of the young man in the Alaskan wilderness. He got hooked by this case, he says. One assumes after reading the book that the main attraction to him was the obvious similarity of Chris McC to himself: he tells us of his own daredevilish solo mountaineering adventure in Alaska, which he survived only by accident. Just as Chris failed to survive by accident.
JK identifies so strongly with Chris that he is sure that there was no death wish, no hidden suicide involved. He digs deep into the person that C. might have been, based on his diaries and on interviews with those who knew him. He tells us of other, similar cases, of survivors and of some who perished. He develops theories about the personalities of the type, without accepting some of the standard pet models, like the Oedipus version. He thinks that C., like not a few of those seduced by the wild, seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. The man enjoyed his 'suffering', the hardships from surviving in nature, and he did not want to die in the experiment. He even tried to proselytize and told others that joy of life comes from encounter with new experiences. (Which, by the way, I would partly buy into, but I know many many who think that their pleasure comes from avoiding surprises and new things.)
The role of the narrator Krakauer is missing in the film, which takes away the philosophical background and reduces it to a good plain story.
The film gives us Chris as a charmer who does odd things. The book is not quite so enthusiastic about him, shows more of his downsides, his monomania, his self-absorption, his impatience and unforgivingness. In short his overlong adolescence. The man died before he grew up.
Why did he die? Survival in the wilderness is tough, and he probably never believed in the concept of mortality as far as it concerned himself. He was not incompetent, but he made some stupid mistakes and had some bad luck.
And definitely Alaska does not seem to be the best place for eremitic experiments. Good thing to know for Hermits.
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I finished Wild quickly.
and for me - Jon Krakauer's writing is the kind of stuff that makes for late nights and tired workdays. I can't pay him a higher compliment. This one was a bit different than his other efforts in that Krakuer plays more the role of detective/sociologist rather than an an insightful expedition biographer. However, the story was as rivetting and perhaps even more powerful. I'm anxiously awaiting his next one! I'd also recommend reading Georgiou's masterpiece-- THE FATES, Fates (classic) if you haven't yet. I stumbled upon it at a book store and can't stop talking about it. His writing style is very similar to Jon Krakauer
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