Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jon KrakauerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-08-21
ISBN: 0307387178
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Into the Wild
Book Review: Sad tale of a mentally ill young man
Summary: 4 Stars
I found myself profoundly sad when I finished this book. Mostly because Chris McCandless was seriously mentally ill (I believe schizophrenic, there are articles that support this theory) and never got any sort of help. He was so desperately searching for something-maybe to feel better, to reinvent himself, to do something profound. He just sinks deeper into his isolation and cannot cope in a situation way over his head. Thinking of him laying in that bus alone dying haunts me. I often wonder why no one tried harder to track him down, stage some sort of intervention-something! Or maybe there are people that just truly can't be helped?
I do wish the book provided more photographs of Chris and details on his life, and less about Krakauer comparing himself to Chris (I was really only interested in Chris' story).
Another sad portrait of a well intentioned but misguided individual (much like the late Timothy Treadwell). I don't think MacCandless' story should be romanticized-what he did was the result of a severely mentally ill person who increasingly lost his hold on reality. He is not to be emulated.
Summary of Into the Wild
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...."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.
West Books
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