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Into the Wild (Paperback) (Paperback)
by Jon Krakauer
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Adventure, Outdoors, Non-fiction |
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Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Anchor
Pub. in: January, 1997
ISBN: 0385486804
Pages: 224
Measurements: x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00234
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0385486804
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller in North America. Ranks #756 in books out of millions out of Amazon.com as of January 29, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
This is an excellent true story about a part of our existance which has not been investigated all that much in modern literature.
Into the Wild is a story of a young man (Chris McCandless) who wished to embark on some thoroughly testing and meaningful adventures in the North American wilderness, which is what any average backpacker wishes to do, except that Chris McCandless wished to take this adventurous reckless abandon to its strongest possible extreme. It is a most remarkable story, meticulously researched, full of mystery and intrigue, and a must for adventurers of the wilderness, both young and old. There are also several other thoroughly intriguing true stories of 'wilderness seekers' in the book.
What is it which motivates those who abandon 'normal life' and seek to obtain a deeper fulfilment in such things as the wildness of nature? Are those who seek a deeper understanding of their own natures and yearnings to be seen as 'foolish idealistic wanderers' and such like? Where is the line between reckless abandonment and truely testing adventure?
A life unexamined is not worth living Socrates said, and some would argue that we can't have truly examined ourselves unless we have thoroughly tested ourselves amongst such things as the wildness of nature. This book is a timely examination of these ideas, and a must for all those who are touched by wilderness, for all those adventerous in spirit and in heart, and for those who wish to obtain a deeper understanding of their own natures, the wilderness, and their place within it.
Chris McCandless lived the way he wanted to; granted he took his contempt for mainstream American culture furrther than most and his life had a tragic ending, but he lived - and died - on his terms. Krakauer's description makes him sound happy with his life. In the end, that's all we can ask for.
Krakauer has gotten some criticism for intertwining his own story with that of McCandless's. There's nothing wrong with him doing so, however. It's impossible to read about McCandless's journey and ultimate death without thinking back on your own life and some of the choices you've made.
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.
[ Partly quoted from Roger McEvilly]
Target readers:
Adventurers、mountaineers、explorers, outdoors and natuure lovers, hikers, any one else who is keen on outdoor adventures and experience, adventure readers, English majors, and advanced English learners.
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Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1954, but moved to Corvallis, Oregon, when he was 2. At age 8, his father introduced him to the Northwest volcanoes and Smith Rocks back when this current climbing mecca was just a "trash heap." Krakauer never considered writing as a career until 1974, when a climbing magazine asked him to recount a first ascent in Alaska. He got more assignments, but had to supplement his meager literary income with work as a carpenter and fisherman. He started with Outside in 1980 and was able to quit fishing and building houses three years later. He is 42 years old and lives in Seattle with his wife of 15 years.
Krakauer is that rarity of rarities, an accomplished climber who can actually write about the sport - and the often-strange characters who do it - with depth and elegance.
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From Publisher
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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THE ALASKA INTERIOR
April 27th, 1992
Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me, Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here.
Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild. - Alex.
(Postcard received by Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, South Dakota.)
Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaska dawn. He didn't appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteen at most. A rifle protruded from the young man's backpack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn't the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the forty-ninth state. Gallien steered his truck onto the shoulder and told the kid to climb in.
The hitchhiker swung his pack into the bed of the Ford and introduced himself as Alex. "Alex?" Gallien responded, fishing for a last name.
"Just Alex," the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. Five feet seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be twenty-four years old and said he was from South Dakota. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and "live off the land for a few months."
Gallien, a union electrician, was on his way to Anchorage, 240 miles beyond Denali on the George Parks Highway; he told Alex he'd drop him off wherever he wanted. Alex's backpack looked as though it weighed only twenty-five or thirty pounds, which struck Gallien - an accomplished hunter and woodsman - as an improbably light load for a stay of several months in the backcountry, especially so early in the spring. "He wasn't carrying anywhere near as much food and gear as you'd expect a guy to be carrying for that kind of trip," Gallien recalls.
The sun came up. As they rolled down from the forested ridges above the Tanana River, Alex gazed across the expanse of windswept muskeg stretching to the south. Gallien wondered whether he'd picked up one of those crackpots from the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack London fantasies. Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.
"People from Outside," reports Gallien in a slow, sonorous drawl, "they'll pick up a copy of Alaska magazine, thumb through it, get to thinkin' 'Hey, I'm goin' to get on up there, live off the land, go claim me a piece of the good life.' But when they get here and actually head out into the bush--well, it isn't like the magazines make it out to be. The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat you alive. Most places, there aren't a lot of animals to hunt. Livin' in the bush isn't no picnic."
It was a two-hour drive from Fairbanks to the edge of Denali Park. The more they talked, the less Alex struck Gallien as a nutcase. He was congenial and seemed well educated. He peppered Gallien with thoughtful questions about the kind of small game that live in the country, the kinds of berries he could eat--"that kind of thing."
Still, Gallien was concerned. Alex admitted that the only food in his pack was a ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harsh conditions of the interior, which in April still lay buried under the winter snowpack. Alex's cheap leather hiking boots were neither waterproof nor well insulated. His rifle was only .22 caliber, a bore too small to rely on if he expected to kill large animals like moose and caribou, which he would have to eat if he hoped to remain very long in the country. He had no ax, no bug dope, no snowshoes, no compass. The only navigational aid in his possession was a tattered state road map he'd scrounged at a gas station.
A hundred miles out of Fairbanks the highway begins to climb into the foothills of the Alaska Range. As the truck lurched over a bridge across the Nenana River, Alex looked down at the swift current and remarked that he was afraid of the water. "A year ago down in Mexico," he told Gallien, "I was out on the ocean in a canoe, and I almost drowned when a storm came up."
A little later Alex pulled out his crude map and pointed to a dashed red line that intersected the road near the coal-mining town of Healy. It represented a route called the Stampede Trail. Seldom traveled, it isn't even marked on most road maps of Alaska. On Alex's map, nevertheless, the broken line meandered west from the Parks Highway for forty miles or so before petering out in the middle of trackless wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. This, Alex announced to Gallien, was where he intended to go.
Gallien thought the hitchhiker's scheme was foolhardy and tried repeatedly to dissuade him: "I said the hunting wasn't easy where he was going, that he could go for days without killing any game. When that didn't work, I tried to scare him with bear stories. I told him that a twenty-two probably wouldn't do anything to a grizzly except make him mad. Alex didn't seem too worried. 'I'll climb a tree' is all he said. So I explained that trees don't grow real big in that part of the state, that a bear could knock down one of them skinny little black spruce without even trying. But he wouldn't give an inch. He had an answer for everything I threw at him."
Gallien offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage, buy him some decent gear, and then drive him back to wherever he wanted to go.
"No, thanks anyway,"Alex replied, "I'll be fine with what I've got."
Gallien asked whether he had a hunting license.
"Hell, no," Alex scoffed. "How I feed myself is none of the government's business. Fuck their stupid rules."
When Gallien asked whether his parents or a friend knew what he was up to--whether there was anyone who would sound the alarm if he got into trouble and was overdue Alex answered calmly that no, nobody knew of his plans, that in fact he hadn't spoken to his family in nearly two years. "I'm absolutely positive," he assured Gallien, "I won't run into anything I can't deal with on my own."
"There was just no talking the guy out of it," Gallien remembers. "He was determined. Real gung ho. The word that comes to mind is excited. He couldn't wait to head out there and get started."
Three hours out of Fairbanks, Gallien turned off the highway and steered his beat-up 4 x 4 down a snow-packed side road. For the first few miles the Stampede Trail was well graded and led past cabins scattered among weedy stands of spruce and aspen. Beyond the last of the log shacks, however, the road rapidly deteriorated. Washed out and overgrown with alders, it turned into a rough, unmaintained track.
In summer the road here would have been sketchy but passable; now it was made unnavigable by a foot and a half of mushy spring snow. Ten miles from the highway, worried that he'd get stuck if he drove farther, Gallien stopped his rig on the crest of a low rise. The icy summits of the highest mountain range in North America gleamed on the southwestern horizon.
Alex insisted on giving Gallien his watch, his comb, and what he said was all his money: eighty-five cents in loose change. "I don't want your money," Gallien protested, "and I already have a watch."
"If you don't take it, I'm going to throw it away," Alex cheerfully retorted. "I don't want to know what time it is. I don't want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters."
Before Alex left the pickup, Gallien reached behind the seat, pulled out an old pair of rubber work boots, and persuaded the boy to take them. "They were too big for him," Gallien recalls. "But I said, 'Wear two pair of socks, and your feet ought to stay halfway warm and dry.'"
"How much do I owe you?"
"Don't worry about it," Gallien answered. Then he gave the kid a slip of paper with his phone number on it, which Alex carefully tucked into a nylon wallet.
"If you make it out alive, give me a call, and I'll tell you how to get the boots back to me."
Gallien's wife had packed him two grilled-cheese-and-tuna sandwiches and a bag of corn chips for lunch; he persuaded the young hitchhiker to accept the food as well. Alex pulled a camera from his backpack and asked Gallien to snap a picture of him shouldering his rifle at the trailhead. Then, smiling broadly, he disappeared down the snow-covered track. The date was Tuesday, April 28, 1992.
Gallien turned the truck around, made his way back to the Parks Highway, and continued toward Anchorage. A few miles down the road he came to the small community of Healy, where the Alaska State Troopers maintain a post. Gallien briefly considered stopping and telling the authorities about Alex, then thought better of it. "I figured he'd be OK," he explains. "I thought he'd probably get hungry pretty quick and just walk out to the highway. That's what any normal person would do." |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
After having had this book for some time, I finally set out to make it part of my summer 2000 reading schedule. I am drawn to books of the northern wilderness, which was the initial attraction to this one. I'll state up front that I have not read anything else by Krakauer, so I cannot draw any comparisons as other reviewers have done.
Krakauer tells the tale effectively. He uses an intelligent vocabulary balanced with a conversational writing style. He easily held my attention as the facts unfolded throughout, employing logic and drawing inferences to fill in many questions that remain. He obviously did his research on the central character, Christopher McCandless, and must have invested countless quantities of money and time to gather accurate information. With so many of the facts of this distressing story remaining obscured probably forever, his assumptions and extrapolations about Chris' actual fate are posed as theories rather than as irreproachable conclusions. I appreciate this aspect of Krakauer's account.
Hats off also to the McCandless family, since Krakauer relied upon them not only for information about their son, tragically lost, but also for their courage in allowing many private family issues to be exposed in support of telling the story as thoroughly as possible. Chris' father, mother, and sister are true heroes in my eyes.
I have some degree of understanding of Chris and his northerly wanderlust, and also an appreciation for the not-so-uncommon desire to conquer the wilderness. What concerns me, however, is the apparent arrogance of the central character. According to the author's account, Chris seemed to possess an intermittent wariness about his closest acquaintances, along with outright rejection of others who cared for him much more than he cared for them. He treated some important people who crossed his path as disposable. But probably Chris's most crucial deficiency was the flippant and over-confident approach towards the actual work of survival in the wilderness. He even seemed a bit contemptuous toward relevant learning despite his quality education and intelligence. He especially needed important knowlege about survival in the wilds of the north. However, he apparently rebuffed all attempts from others to assist him in his quest. I have spent considerable time in the extreme north of B.C. (an area not entirely dissimilar to Alaska): it is ridiculous, misguided, and presumptuous to embark on such an adventure with the dearth of equipment, supplies, and knowledge as did Chris. I would want to know everything possible about how to survive such a life and death endeavor. Indeed, I feel a strange combination of sadness and anger as I reflect on Chris's unfortunate departure. Was his death ultimately caused by youthful innocence or arrogant ignorance? It is a question I cannot answer and I commend Krakauer for his deft ability to stimulate thought in the reader rather than provide tidy little assumptive answers.
My only complaint: the personal reflective chapter towards the end of the book. I understand why Krakauer included it (personal connections with the need for adventure, context, struggles with nature, etc.), but for me it was irrelevant and it de-railed the flow of the story.
Perhaps we can learn from Christopher McCandless' experience, not in any attempt to qualify him as a martyr or to label him a fool. I have thought about how my appreciation for the north has changed, how families need to be close, the requirement to really listen to and understand people, and countless other themes which have been tweaked by Jon Krakauer's writing about Chris' misadventure. I recommend this book highly.
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J. Lemanski (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
I'm afraid to sound overly enthusiastic about this book for fear that those so "annoyed" by it will take their anger in spending [money] on Jon Krakauer. Krakauer is a great journalistic writer and his work and research far exceeds any ficticious adventure flick.
I can understand how one can get confused with the shifts in location and time during McCandless's two year journey, but retracing the man's steps should not be the focus. Krakauer enlightens the reader and unfolds the mystery of McCandless's death as interviews, childhood experiences and stories of similar adventurers give greater insight to the man's psyche. I was continuously facinated as I read highlighted passages from McCandless's books, grafitto, et al which Krakauer includes at the beginning of each chapter. All the research he has done is not just laid out flat, but revealed in a dialogue between him and the reader.
Others I've read remark McCandless as stupid, selfish, uninteresting, and a waste of a human life, suggesting stories by Jack London as a superior examination of human condition.
"McCandless [and other readers obviously] conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print" (44).
It is sad to know that such a life holds more respect than one man's passion to actually live out his beliefs as did McCandless.
As far as calling this man stupid and selfish, some readers happen to skim over the parts about his college education and donating [money] to OXFAM America, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger. I don't know where you live, but how many teenagers do you know who read War and Peace and spend the last of their money to buy hamburgers to give to the homeless while their peers are out partying?
McCandless may have been overly confident and stubborn to make his way on his own, but weren't his ideals real? Those who knew him speak of his true love of nature and high spirits. How anyone can claim he was wasting his life instead of living for the gain of material possesions is beyond me. McCandless reached his dream of living off the land and he did it for over 100 days, while others work their whole lives and feel empty, never knowing the real beauty of the world.
Krakauer tells of experiences with Alaskan hunters who claim that McCandless was wrong in thinking the animal he killed was a moose after examining the bones. "It was definitely a caribou...you'd have to be pretty stupid not to tell them apart" (177). Krakauer later found out that the animal was in fact a moose. Seems as though the natives are overly confident of themselves as well.
And had it not been for a bit of information left out in a refernce book of edible plants, McCandless may have survived.
The main thing that saddens me when I read reviews with low ratings is the hypocritical way the reader will toss off a man's life as not worth the pages in this book while complaining about McCandless wasting his own life. No one is trying to make this man out as a saint and judging his actions on your own ideas of success does not give your life more reason.
I'll end with a few quotes of the book that some may need to read over:
"McCandless wasn't some reckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily. He demanded much of himself-more, in the end, than he could deliver" (184).
"'Sure he screwed up' Roman answers, 'but I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I've never done it. And I'd bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing but what you hunt and gather-most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off'" (185).
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
This is the tragic stroy of Christopher McCandless, a man who was willing to sacrafice everything for a chance at experiencing life as few people ever do. One day Chris, or Alexander Supertramp as he preferred to be called, decided to cut all ties with the modern world and live in absolute freedom. Jon Krakauer beautifully narrates the reader through Alexander's ill-fated adventure that finally ended in an abandoned bus in the wilds of Alaska. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a collection of colorful people who have also sought escape from the trials of daily life. These glimpses help to put Alexander's uncommon desire to break from modern society into its proper perspective. Into the Wild is also a story about one family's love for their son, and the search for understanding and closure concerning his eventual death. In the process the reader is given great insight into the mind, and possible motives for his desire to escape. But, as we find out this is not just the story of one family, but, the story of many people and families that Alexander touched in his odyessy across America. Despite the fact that Alexander's quest cost him his life, I would dare to say that during those four brief months he felt more alive and experienced more than most people do in a entire lifetime. His warm smile on the opening page is a testament to the happiness, and contentment that he experienced in his self-imposed solitude. Finally, this is not merely a book about the tragedy of death, it is instead a celebration of nature and one mans quest to experience it.
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Cecelia (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
I loved this book. It's one of the most original and satisfying works of non-fiction I've read in a long time. Mr. Krakauer writes beautifully, and he did an amazing amount of on-the-ground research to unravel the mystery of Chris McCandless, a very remarkable, if difficult, young man.
Having just read the 1-star review below by the anonymous person from Freeport Maine, I can't let his/her negative observations pass without comment. First of all, Freeport accuses Mr. Krakauer of writing Into the Wild in order to cash in on the success of his bestseller Into Thin Air. This is somewhat unlikely, because Into the Wild was published more than a year BEFORE Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air!
Also, Freeport opines that McCandless's "story and his family should be left alone. Shame on Mr. Krakauer for attempting to profit from their intense loss." The only problem with this opinion is that the McCandless family has stated publicly that they are extremely glad Mr. Krakauer wrote Into the Wild.
In early 1996, a month or two before Mr. Krakauer went to Mt. Everest, I saw him give a lecture/slide show about Into the Wild at a Borders bookstore outside of Baltimore. At the beginning of the lecture Mr. Krakauer introduced Walt and Billie McCandless, Chris's parents, who were in the audience that night. After the slide show I approached them and told them how much I admired their son. Then I asked them what they thought of Mr. Krakauer's book. They said they were extremely grateful that Mr. Krakauer had written it, because Into the Wild had answered many riddles about their son that had been troubling them - riddles that would have otherwise gone unanswered. Mr. McCandless even admitted that in some ways Mr. Krakauer had probably come to know Chris better than they knew him during the last years of his life. Both Mr. and Mrs. McCandless spoke quite highly of Mr. Krakauer's integrity and his skill as a journalist.
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