Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
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Book Reviews of Into the Wild
Book Review: Wildly Unforgettable
Summary: 5 Stars
"...there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun...we just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living..."
-Alexander Supertramp
Certainly unconventional, Into the Wild, is not your typical coming of age story. Christopher McCandless, a graduate fresh from college abandoned all aspects of the predictable way of life to be immersed in nature and his personal ideals. Leaving behind family, his few friends, and his own name, McCandless or Alexander Supertramp was, "a man of means, by no means...king of the road." However Into the Wild is not chronological fiction-esque novel, but more of a scavenger hunt jumbled with Krakauer's personal and historical anecdotes. Into the Wild is not only informative on the life of Chris McCandless, but also of other figures with similar stories, and some of Krakauer's past as well.
This novel, as it follows a young boy through his journey, is not just a memoir, but more of a warning and source of inspiration. If I would take anything away from this story it would be the need for personal experiences. McCandless warns against a stationary life, not only physically but mentally and to perpetually change. The story begins as Chris road trips across the US in a run down old car, and ends in a run down old bus in semi-Alaskan wilderness. And between those two circumstances lay hippie camps, encounters with southwestern farmers, danger on the railroad, kayaking on the Mexican border, bonding with strangers, and a final trek into the Alaskan wilderness. Chris heeds all to find themselves in nature and to travel by ever-changing scenery
McCandless, stated in Into the Wild, was criticized as a young naïve radical, without the common sense to take on an adventure of this proportion. However, McCandless was an extremely intelligent young man, not only a college graduate, but always earning high marks in all courses, an avid reader of philosophy and a follower of Thoreau. The novel doesn't really focus on Chris's life before his cross-country adventure, so its hard to see if his experiences we read about really affected him as a person, or if he was the same way his entire time.
This story was an eye-opening experience. As Chris wandered around the American continent I wandered my own mind. Chris's attitude and way of life melted through the pages of this novel and into my own fingertips. His individual character, and never-ending love of nature and his charismatic way of drawing in the people he met in his life. I can only offer my sincere recommendation for this novel as the story gives so much to you.
Book Review: Read the Book Before You See the Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
"Into the Wild" is soon to be released in movie theaters across the country and is already receiving rave reviews, not only for Sean Penn's role as the film's director, but also for its engrossing storyline. "Into the Wild," the nonfiction book, began with an article by moutaineer Jon Krakauer in "Outside" magazine. When a young man turned up dead in a school bus in the wilds of Alaska, north of Mt. McKinley, Krakauer began to explore the fascinating true tale of Christopher McCandless.
McCandless, son of a well-to-do family from the Washington, DC, area had just graduated from Emory University in Atlanta. His family thought that he had plans to continue on to law school, but McCandless had another vision. After graduating, he donated $25,000 (intended for law school) to OXFAM and began on a journey that would take him across the country, north to Alaska, and ultimately, to his own untimely death.
Not only did Chris McCandless give up all his worldy possessions, he abandoned a middle class mindset and vision of life for himself. Instead, he followed the ideas and ideals he found in the books of Thoreau and Tolstoy (among other authors) and lived by his own wits. He spent considerable time in the desert of the Southwest, but his vision was always to adopt the life of the wild, as envisioned in books of Jack London.
Along the way, McCandless--who renamed himself Alex McCandless or even Alexander Supertramp once he arrived in Alaska--met a variety of individuals, all of whom remember him as a thoughtful, hard working, intelligent young man who sought to follow his own vision of the way life should be. He was not a loner, although he spent considerable time on his two year journey by himself, living off the land. He also cut off all ties to his family, even eventually with his closest sibling, a sister. He did not want anyone or anything to deter him from his vision, from finding his "truth."
Author Jon Krakauer does an amazing job with this tale, interweaving interviews with those who knew McCandless and helped him along the way. He also compares the desire of McCandless as a young man on an unusual path to his own youthful desires to scale dangerous mountains alone. "Into the Wild" is not the type of story going from point A to point Z in a straight line, but it will engage you even as it sidetracks into other stories, other visions, other experiences of dreamers like McCandless.
Don't miss Krakauer's book! The insight and thoughtful approach he has taken in this book toward his sometimes unknowable subject will provide a wonderful background to the movie.
Book Review: "God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you."
Summary: 5 Stars
What a sad tale. Having first seen the movie, I wanted to know more and so read Krakauer's book. The book, of course, gives many more essential details the movie never goes into, such as the devious behavior of Chris McCandless's father, and perhaps the real cause of Chris' tragic death.
I haven't read any of the over 1000 reviews posted here. I get the sense, though, that some people find this story unworthy of being told, or that Krakauer is somehow biased in the telling of it. I disagree completely. This story is one that is happening every day. At some turning point in our lives, we faced a decision: to join up with society and seek success within it or to rush into the great unknown, for whatever reason. In Chris' case, he turned his inner turmoil into a spiritual quest for the new, the beautiful, the extraordinary, and the natural world which would somehow remove him from the corruption of his own existence, as polluted by his father and mother.
I think Krakauer does a fantastic job in immersing us in Chris' passionate life. Almost no detail is spared. And parallels to Chris are given with others who have attempted to live in the wild, away from society's soft pleasures and easy ways. Yet no one was quite like this kid. One cannot help but think what he might have become: a fanatic Obama supporter? A deeply religious monk? A great social worker? A devoted father? A Green Peace leader? It's almost a certainty, however, that whatever he would have done, he would have thrown his heart and soul into it.
There's no doubt that his sad, lonely death was an accident. As a father myself, I look on this book as a cautionary tale and a warning. Our children certainly are beyond our control at some point down the line, so all one can do as a parent is just be there for them, as nonjudgmentally as is humanly possible. No one was able to stop Chris from his path to Alaska, but one senses he was gaining much-needed wisdom out there in the wilderness. He was on his way back. That is the overwhelming tragedy here: the finality of his frivolous death.
We are reminded again and again in this book of "the soul-flights of the adolescent" and the glorious ideals harbored within his or her uncompromising being. Extraordinary quotes from the works of Thoreau, Pasternak, Jack London, and others are intermingled with the overwrought writings of Chris himself. How can we not feel empathy for his troubled spirit and his longing heart? Ironically, one of the last stories he read was Tolstoy's "Family Matters." Perhaps that title holds more meaning for all of us than we realize.
Book Review: Those who criticize are just plainly lost
Summary: 5 Stars
First caught a glimpse of the movie, than read the book, and than watched the entire movie again. Both were great, both where different. You just can't simply try to understand the movie without reading the book first, it has much more depth. My reviews are going to be more towards the bad reviewers and those who criticized Christopher McCandless.
Isn't mankind's greatest ambition is to look beyond the stars and find ourselves amongst the universe? To set out blindly in the hopes that we discover something greater than ourselves.
The human spirit is always seeking adventure and the greatest rewards come from the greatest of challenges and difficulties. The challenge of knowing you can never be fully prepared no matter how much preparation and time you've given yourself. The idea of making the best out of a bad situation and getting the most out of what you have. Christopher said it best in his letter to Wayne when he said that his travels where too easy with all the money he had given him with his paycheck. That things were a lot more exciting when he was penniless.
Through the book you realize that his problem with his family meant nothing overall because the fact is everyone one comes from some degree of a dysfunctional family and the experience you gain from those moments in your life are what builds your characteristics. The story is about human ambition, the raw nature of the human spirit, to explore knowledge beyond our horizon and this is revealed through Christopher's story.
Those who criticize his story and his individuality are those who are lost in today's society. Lost in their secure 9 to 5 jobs, weekend getaways, and nightly extravaganzas. Those who measure their lives with the wealth they've accumulated and could never see the world beyond their front door. Would you be on the same pages of those who thought it was insane to colonize in North America and deal with the Natives after Columbus had accidently discovered the new world. Or thought the Lewis and Clark expedition across America was too farfetched. Or perhaps the Wright Brothers should have never even attempted to build a machine that can fly because in your mind it goes against the realm of normal. Without the attempts of these historic individuals, America would not be where it is today. But that's alright, be content with your simple minded life because when it's all over and you're lying on your deathbed, you wouldn't even begin to comprehend your existence in this universe.
Book Review: Uncompromising Idealism meets Unforgiving Nature
Summary: 5 Stars
The cover tells the story; a young dreamer from a well-to-do family gives away his money and possessions before trudging into the Alaskan wild on a quest for spiritual awakening. Four months later, his body is discovered by moose hunters. The plot of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild can be reduced to those few words, so why has this simple story inspired readers to trek twenty miles into the unforgiving wilderness to visit his final resting place? Why has he become the center of a cult-like mythology and the genesis of 2007's most ambitious biopic? Of those who read his story or see it on screen, some will understand, while others will simply judge him. Whether there exists within the reader a connection to the natural world, a desire to discern the boundaries of mankind's ability to survive in a perilous environment and a hunger for incorruptible truth and sometimes painful honesty will play heavily into the reward/enjoyment of his story.
Chris McCandless never outlived the phase many young adults experience in their years after college or high school when they first realize the ugliness of the world. By tracing the last years of his life, Krakauer depicts McCandless as wide-eyed and childlike, as he holds to a simplistic belief that people just need to be good to each other to make the most out of their short time on earth. But with his Holden Caulfield-like epiphanies about the deceit and phoniness of the world, he is drawn to the one place he knows he can find truth: the wild.
On his odyssey tramping throughout the West, McCandless encounters a Homer-like string of splendid characters. Like his own search for the meaning of "rosebud", Krakauer allows those closest to the young vagabond fill his pages with their anecdotes and reflections. Although their experiences are different, they all describe him as an unforgettable stranger who wandered into their lives and didn't stay long enough.
By practicing his "love one another" approach to life, McCandless inspired those who met him and continues to inspire those who read about him 15 years after his death. The great tragedy of his life is that someone who had such an impact on those he encountered spent most of his time with Tolstoy, Thoreau and London. But by illustrating how those men were with the dying romantic in his last days, Krakaeur shows us that many of his readers will carry Chris McCandless with them until their end.