Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
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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