Into the Wild (Paperback)

“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 Krakauers book tries to answer. While it doesntƒ??cannotƒ??answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandlesss “Alaskan odyssey,” but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegners 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 books end, McCandless isnt merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was “a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot,” you wont soon forget Christopher McCandless.