Into the Wild: The true story of a fatal journey into the harsh Alaskan wilderness

TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH, NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES, ULTIMATE FREEDOM, AN EXTREMIST, AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA, THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, `CAUSE "THE WEST IS THE BEST". AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREAtEST ADVENTRURE, THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONVLUDE THE SPRITITUAL PILGRIMAGE. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE BREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISIONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD.ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMPMAY 1992..... inscription of Chris McCandless "Alexander Supertramp" inspired by the spirit of Roger Miller song tells you everything about Chris's quest and the book "Into the Wild"."In to the wild" takes you through an exceptional, highly moving, haunting and heartbreaking but inspiring story of man's journey in to the unforgiving wilderness to explore oneself.It is story about a young man's, Christopher Johnson McCandless "Alexander Supertramp", odyssey in to the wilderness of Alaska. He was intelligent, personable and talented, yet not happy. His search of happiness and freedom did cost him his life in the end but will inspire you. This book provides very well researched account of his hitchhiking from one extreme to other; people he met; friend he made; pain his family went through; his quest and his point of view. Book provides you fact from Chris that will keep you force you to think whether Chris was crazy or just unlucky.Jon Krakauer has gathered facts from Chris's inscriptions, journals, books (he read), notes, letters and interview with family, friends and people he met during these two years. Jon did a great job in reconstructing his journey..wow...Good: Very well researched and very well written, fast paced and keeps you engaged.Not so good: didn't like section about Jon's expedition to Devil's thumb as it wasn't necessary.Did watch the movie "In to the wild" directed by Sean Penn, based on this book as well... combo was great experience.-- ashutosh jhureley

I listened to the audio version of this book and Philip Franklin does a great job with the narration. I haven’t read Jon Krakauer before and I enjoyed the author’s writing style and the gradual unfolding of Chris McCandless’ story. I’d never heard of Chris McCandless before this and I found the story fascinating, tragic and scarcely credible in parts. If this had been fiction I can imagine the reader or listener berating the ‘hero’ for his lack of foresight and preparation before embarking on such a dangerous and uncertain journey.Jon Krakauer explores Chris’ McCandless’s life, and death, through his family, Chris’ own notes, photographs and letters, plus the people he met on his travels, most of whom felt a compelling pull towards the young man and came to love him.Basically, I’m not sure what to think. Here’s a highly academically intelligent young man who had a privileged upbringing, protesting strongly against world hunger and the wastage of food. He was angry at his father who lead a double life for several years, which is understandable. Perhaps it was a combination of these things, coupled with the books he was fond of reading by authors such as Jack London, Tolstoy and Thoreau to name just a few, which fired his imagination and passions for the idea of travel and survival in remote and unforgiving areas, ultimately the wilderness. He believed a person should own nothing apart from whatever they could carry. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny.The story begins on April 27th, 1992 as Chris, or Alex as he now calls himself, is hitching from Fairbanks, Alaska and is offered a lift by Jim Gallien. He wants a ride to the edge of Denali National Park so he can just walk into the bush and live off the land for a few months.Chris’ death was a tragedy which could have been avoided if he’d prepared for his stay in the wilds of Alaska with practicality and learned enough about endurance in such a harsh environment. That he chose not to, shows a lack of common sense, an underestimation of the wilderness and what it takes to survive.Chris’ idealism and intensity caused a tremendous amount of hurt and suffering. It seems he had no thought of how his lack of communication would affect his parents, Walt and Billie, and Carine, the sister he supposedly loved. I can only imagine how distraught his family must have been during the whole time Chris was missing from their lives. Then, to learn he died in such dreadful circumstances had to have been beyond devastating.During the course of the narrative Jon Krakauer does an impressive job of delving into the mindset of adventurers drawn to the ‘call of the wild’, including himself. It’s apparent, and understandable, that he feels a fascination for, and identifies with, Chris McCandless, given the parallels between their lives. He doesn’t claim to be an impartial biographer, quite the opposite. I don’t, however, agree with the view that Chris’ mistakes were innocent ones. He deliberately went into the Alaskan wilderness rashly, unprepared and without the basic necessities or any kind of reserve or support should he find himself in an emergency situation, despite all advice to the contrary.In the end, Chris lived his life the way he wanted to, mostly isolated from people and minus the pointless, as he saw it, trappings of a materialistic society, and paid the ultimate price. It’s still a very sad end to such a short life. I found the recounting of the last few weeks of his life, via the journals he kept, very poignant. Especially since it seems Chris was ready to return to civilisation and, had he possessed the relevant map and knowledge, would more than likely have made it. Jon Krakauer’s theory on the cause of Chris’ death seems the most reasonable explanation and makes a lot of sense. I’ll be checking out more of this author’s work.

Into The Wild challenges many assumptions. Is it truly possible to go back to basics and to survive in the wilderness without the trappings of modern society?I found this book to be a good read, well researched and well written. The glimpses of other people's wilderness experiences and of the books that Chris McCandless read up to his death are enlightening.At the end of it you are still left asking 'why?'. It is unsettling. Here was a young man who had a comfortable upbringing, a high-achiever who opted out of the life path that already seemed to be mapped out for him.I think part of his motivation was the negative. The need to move out from the shadow of an ultra-achieving parent, the need to assert your own personality, an almost 'I'll show you' attitude as he displayed his own independence, perhaps exacerbated by a late discovery of the skeleton in the family cupboard.But there is also a degree of irresponsibility - covering his tracks, effectively penalising those who cared about him, and the episode where he drove his car illegally far into the parklands, abandoning it in the gulch after a flood.After time spent tramping the country, trying to improve his skills along the way, he seemed to be looking for the ultimate 'back to the wild' experience. Just what is this ultimate experience? Is it driving a well-stocked 4x4 down the tracks, parking up where other people might pass, telling friends and family where you are, putting the steaks on the barbecue and opening a few beers, taking a radio, maps, a decent hunting rifle, all the paraphernalia that modern society can provide? Or is it something else? I think Chris McCandless wanted this ultimate experience on his own terms. It meant he had to put his life in danger, and this led him to ignore advice and to take more risks than he needed to. For the experience to be real there had to be a significant risk of death. This meant no comforts, no easy escape routes. And it meant he really could die.Was Chris' behaviour just a proxy for some kind of long drawn out suicide? I don't think so. He accepted the risk of death, even embraced it. Perhaps death would be the ultimate 'I told you so', but true success would involve surviving the experience; and at the end he was hoping for rescue. If he had a better map, better local knowledge, better understanding of what foods to eat, maybe the outcome would have been different. If...This book inspired me to try to engage more with nature, but not to try to do what Chris McCandless did.

Interesting book, but there are a few things I didn't enjoy very much. I hoped to learn more than I already knew from tv etc about the story of what happened to the boy, but I didn't really. It's more about his life up to that point, but what happened in Alaska was just what i already knew. But that's not to take anything away from the book, but just left me unsatisfied. Also I personally felt that the author's purpose from the beginning was to convince people that the boy he's writing about wasn't just stupid and unprepared but made a tragic mistake that anyone could have made resulting in his death. Unfortunately the more I read the subject really annoyed me and he constantly was getting into trouble in the name of adventure that he kept relying on others to get him out of! I ended up thinking that he was more selfish and stupid than I had when I started! When you really don't like the subject of a book much, it's hard to enjoy it and I also don't enjoy it when I feel i'm being shoehorned into coming to particular conclusions, which is what I felt from this book. The last thing is that the dictionary on my kindle took a real battering reading this. Especially early on, there were long words that i'd never heard of in every sentence and I read a lot! It was quite interesting to learn all these new words but hard to get into the flow of the book when you have to keep looking them up in the dictionary!

I picked up this book because I liked the story idea; I didn't have a clue who Jon Krakauer or Chris McCandless was, but now I'm glad I know. The quote on the back cover, by Books Magazine, probably sums it up best:"An extraordinary and highly moving story ... a classic, haunting, unsettling, yet also inspiring"It's pretty well written and structured, with some good quotes (by Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy amongst others) to kick start each chapter - a handful of them were actually highlighted passages in books owned by McCandless. Krakauer's storytelling is inviting and descriptive. McCandless' journey, and his journal entries are interesting and inspiring to read.You may or may not have heard about the movie as well. Personally, I thought the movie was rubbish. I found myself sticking up for it after watching because I thought so highly of the book and the story itself. But, honestly, I think if you want to see the true emotion and inspiration that seeps so naturally from the book, give the movie a miss. Unless you have 2 and a half hours to spare and particularly like any of the actors in it (any Kristen Stewart fans here?) then you'd probably rather stick to the book. It's so much better.

What might motivate someone to cut all ties with their family, to give away all of their money to charity, dispose of their belongings and adopt a life on the road? In this day and age our possessions and vocations end up owning us, so it comes as somewhat of a shock to the system to see that a young and intelligent man would decide to dispose of the normal trappings of life. McCandless is infamous for having starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness, though the book looks at what brought him there.In fact McCandless had spent a year or more on the road, moving from place to place throughout western and northern USA, holding down some basic jobs for a short time before moving on, seeming to all as though he were just one more drifter passing through. Though the book delicately looks at the young mans travels and examines the thoughts of McCandless as they are relayed through photographs and the accounts of the people he encountered along the way.We find it so strange to think that somebody could turn their back on the trapping of society and seek to do nothing more than to travel around without the normal worries we all carry. Whilst I started the book knowing this young man starved to death, I could not help but feel that McCandless was doing something that many people do not have the courage for. A wonderful if somewhat sad read.

Excellent book in excellent condition – small print, though.

I enjoyed watching the film, a rarity for me, so when this came up on a Kindle deal for 99p i didn’t hesitate.After watching the film i was of the mind that Chris McCandless was a total idiot, as apparently were most of the people who heard the basic story of his demise. But was it fair on him to be portrayed in that way? I wanted to know a bit more.Jon was the reporter who first brought this story to the world in an article he was asked to write for ‘Outdoor Magazine’. But he knew he hadn’t done the story justice in the time constraints that he’d had to get that article written, so he went back over the whole story and wrote this book.And this book really does put things into context. One thing the film doesn’t cover is the childhood that Chris and his sister suffered under a domineering, controlling, and oft times abusive, father who demanded excellence all the time, and when Chris found out the truth about his father’s excellence — how Chris and his sister came to be born — i think something really snapped inside him. He just wanted to be free of everything his father represented, to get as far away from it as possible — and having been bought up by a father like that who i had to escape from at 15 years old into my own wilderness, i can’t blame Chris whatsoever for being like he was and doing what he did, in fact, i totally understand.As to the writing, this story is incredibly well thought out and presented and really does put a lot of Chris’ behaviour and attitude into a much broader perspective than a film could ever hope to get to.So if you have watched the film then please don’t just stop with that view of Chris, i don’t think that’s fair. Take a little while, read this book and get to see a much wider picture of Chris McCandless.

Ótimo livro

Ya había visto la película y me encantó, así como su BSO, que es fantástica. El libro me ha gustado mucho, cuenta más sobre la personalidad de Chris y sobre sus vivencias, además de otras historias que el escritor nos cuenta y que aporta mucho a nivel personal. Es un libro que emociona y me ha hecho llorar en varios pasajes, no sé si por temas personales o es algo que a los que les ha gustado el libro les ha pasado, pero es así, sobre todo al final, cuando sus padres van a visitar el sitio donde su hijo murió. Me gustaría ir allí algún día. Puedo entender la personalidad de Chris, se parece a una persona importante para mí que murió e igual por eso me emociona tanto. También me han gustado mucho las diversas citas de diversos autores, sobre todo de Pasternak de Dr. Zhivago. Volveré a ver la película de nuevo, que por cierto, refleja muy bien el libro.

Acquistato in inglese perché preferisco leggere i libri nella loro lingua originale se la conosco. Bellissima lettura, riletto più volte.

Great book

Spannend en avontuurlijk, ook dramatisch.