Travel to United States

Into the Wild

Format: Paperback
Author: Jon Krakauer
ReleaseDate: 20 January, 1997
Publisher: Anchor
Rating:

The blank spot on the map...
The turning of each page was a personal struggle to justify Chris McCandless's worthiness of having his story told. The greatest of adventures are often journeys toward something; this book, at times, however, read like the account of the journey home. What made the 203 pages worthy of your eyes and mind, though, was the brilliance of Jon Krakauer's defining of the tragedy.

Chris was not a rare person in that it was the incomplete realization of his greatest strengths that were also his most profound weaknesses. Anyone familiar with the story could easily have dismissed it as a tale of an over-ambitious youth, struggling unnecessarily with mundane complexities of interpersonal relationships, and arriving at a radical and ultimately tragic resolution. Krakauer, however, discovered and portrayed in him an intense radiance that revealed the extraordinary in the otherwise unremarkable.

"He was looking for more adventure and freedom than today's society gives people. . . [he] yearned to wander unchartered country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map. . . [so] he simply got rid of the map. "

The book appealed to me more as an account of the writer's adventure to a preconceived conclusion; an account of the justification of his own heart's insistence that there was a tragedy here greater and more universal than the death of this young man - perhaps of every young man.

At the book's conclusion, I felt as if I had somehow in the journey home arrived at the end of an unexpected adventure, finally convinced of Chris McCandless's worthiness to have his story told simply because it inspired a gifted storyteller to tell it.

A good read
All I have to say is that it is a good read.

Quick and easy read
It had an interesting story, but I couldn't help thinking the only reason it was being written was because the kid died. I picked up this book because my husband was reading it. There is nothing particularly great about the story. I was very irritated on all the side stories (including the author, talking about himself) within the book, which didn't add anything except pages in an already thin book. Outdoorsy people may like this book, but unless you like reading about how people get themselves killed by being overconfident, skip this one. .

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