Into the Wild | Jon Krakauer | Modern Day Vision Quest

Into the Wild | Jon Krakauer | One of the best ever

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Into the Wild

	Into the Wild Jon Krakauer Anchor, 2007 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 1214 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Modern Day Vision Quest

Having loved the movie, and long put off reading the book (whose cover blurb sold me on it long before I knew of how well Krakauer wrote), I finally have read Into The Wild.

It is a life changing book, for me - a brilliant piece of work almost impossible to quantify for others, but I'll take a shot, briefly.

There are a lot of people (Alaskans, in particular) who resent the attention paid to Chris McCandless. He is considered by some to be an arrogant, and ill-prepared elite who had no sense at all to attempt what he accomplished. At the end of his great adventure he died, after all. As if that fact lays bare the nature and heart of what McCandless accomplished on his personal journey. The book spends a great deal of time addressing this attitude directly, and while everyone is all too aware of the errors and faults (some of which can be interpreted as arrogance, not using a map for instance), the author's impressions, research and conclusions tell a very different story.

This isn't about Alaska, or dying in Alaska. It is about our culture's detachment from honest, obvious and impacting rights of passage and how this natural need is bound to cost us the lives of some of our young - the ones daring enough to try to live life according to their own beliefs, passions and need for honest, truthful self discovery.

I shouldn't say what it is about, really. I've read many reviews and opinions wherein the writer gives their interpretation of 'what it is about' and accuse others of 'not getting it'. That is one of the beauties of this book - it is necessarily going to carry a different message to many different people.

Parents may face the cold reality that they do not ultimately control their children when they mature - and that the grey line between childhood and adulthood necessitates some dangerous transitions, if it is to benefit the adult in the making.

Mortality isn't something many in the West are comfortable with - to have died (whatever quality of life proceeds it) is the ultimate failure to many people. That this attitude prescribes a life of fear and limitation seems to escape most. Chris lived more life than many such people, and did so in 1/4 the time.

I'm predictably rambling and being less coherent than I'd like, so I'll start to close with a quote from the book:

"It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less that in most others. Danger always held a certain allure. That , in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme."

I feel that McCandless ultimately gave us a worthy example mixed perfectly with a cautionary tale, and the jewels he unearthed through hard work most of us would never dream of attempting. After all was said and done, he concluded "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED", an intensely powerful conclusion for someone to attain after leaving everyone else behind.

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One of the best ever

This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It embodies brilliantly the theme of the search for God. Defintly the greatest nonfiction book I've ever read, even if the author talked a little too much about himself. Far better than the likes of the fictional "Touching spirit Bear" or whatnot. This book is so magical and is perfect for anyone, especially a teen, who feel depressed or alienated.

A Great Lesson in What Not to Do and How Not to Live (and Die)

I read Into the Wild in conjunction with reading The Final Frontiersman by James Campbell. Into the Wild is the biography of Chris McCandless, a pathetic and self-centered, and self-destructive screw-up who died trying to be a "supertramp" (his term) in Alaska. The Final Frontiersman, on the other hand, is about the life of Heimo Korth, a successful backcountry trapper and survivalist in ANWR (see my Amazon review). I cannot avoid comparing Korth and McCandless. The main difference is that Korth is planfully competent, whereas McCandless seemed incompetent in every way. Study the life of McCandless to learn what not to do, how not to go wrong.

McCandless was a distinct failure as a human being and his life is not worth a biography except as an example of negative teaching. As a valuable negative lesson Into the Wild is a worthy book and I think superior to The Final Frontiersman. Krakauer is able to probe the depths of his subject and inject it with a sense of angst and wonder that is missing from The Final Frontiersman.

Two passages especially in Into the Wild make it a classic of adventure literature. One is the absolutely definitive statement of the adventure mentality of the young male on pages 56-57 of the paperback edition. This passage from a letter written by McCandless to a friend should be read and studied and critiqued by every young man--and every young woman. It contains the clearest, most gripping statement of a view that is at once exhilarating and dangerous. I will only quote two sentences from a much longer passage. "...in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure." I guess as long as these sentiments lead only to forays into the wild I have no problem with them. It is when they lead to warfare, destruction, rampage, and vandalism, as they most certainly do, that I withdraw assent. I suppose the passion for adventure is selected for by evolution and is thus inevitable. The problem comes when the passion for adventure becomes the passion for violence as it often does; not however with Chris McCandless--except violence towards himself, and perhaps vandalism of cabins in Alaska. Into the Wild is a basic text for studying this most creative, destructive, and seductive "passion for adventure."

The other passage that I especially valued was Krakauer's description of his own attempt at a first ascent of the north face of the Devil's Thumb, a remote peak in Alaska. This also was the result of a young man's "passion for adventure" and Krakauer almost lost his life in the pursuit. Krakauer's lengthy description of his adventure--the dangers, and horrors, and failures--is a brilliant piece of adventure writing. For me, this is the best and most exciting part of the book.

Krakauer also has absorbing discussions of other wilderness adventurers and the entire history of the American "passion for wilderness adventure."

The author of Into the Wild is a more interesting, sensitive, perceptive, and intelligent person than his subject in this biography. I look forward to reading Krakauer's autobiography when he writes it. It will be an even better book than Into the Wild.

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A good complement to a much better movie

It's rare that I'm motivated to both read a book and watch the same movie, but the Into the Wild movie was so impressive that I checked this book out from the library as well. It fills in a lot of additional information in the storyline, but also has a few major shortcomings.

It was impressive to see the book elaborate so much on the McCandless family's history. Krakauer went into much more detail in building up Walt and Billie as success stories in the American Dream, having both come up from working-class backgrounds in the West and Michigan respectively to run a lucrative consulting firm. At the same time, he emphasized their tragic flaws in detailing how they carried on an affair and had illegitimate children, then hid the truth from those children. I got the impression from both the book and the movie that there was a lot of self-centeredness and resentment around the household, both from Chris and from his parents. We didn't see much more from Carine, though; she was a narrator who tried to be fair to both parties in the movie, and also didn't seem to take much of a side in the book.

Chris himself was also filled in around the edges a lot in the book. The reader can see how his academic prowess came long before Emory, at Woodson High School--although his stubborn nature also did, as he had one F on his transcript in a physics class where he did not follow the format on lab reports. His political views are shown as conflicted, as many young, intellectually curious men and women are; his tending to the poor is supplanted with an unusual combination of founding (re-founding? Newt Gingrich was there once) the Emory College Republicans, railing against religious right leaders, and railing against "rich kids at Emory" in general (even if he was one himself.) It has been debated on here whether McCandless' foolishness was a sign of liberalism or conservatism, and whether Dennis Kucinich supporter Sean Penn was trying to prove a point about materialism and upper-class suburbia in the movie, but some of the answers are right there. McCandless is shown as emotionally distant, not much for human relationships or romance, and preferential of books over human friendship during his time at Emory, just as he was in the remaining two years of his life. His spartan lifestyle is also exposed, as he had a bare-bones living in his Atlanta apartment, without even a telephone. His trying relationship with his family is shown in even more detail; one has to wonder what led him to not have a potential "internship" with his parents' consulting firm during one of the summers that he instead drove across America the first time--an opportunity that would surely have helped him achieve his goals of attending Harvard Law School and becoming a great human rights attorney (not to mention he may have many more gaps of meaningful employment to explain from his final trip, had he returned alive.) It is intriguing that the book explains how he nearly blew his cover and revealed his whereabouts to his parents, and that we find out what happened to his washed-out car (it is used as a police car.)

Many of the characters he meets along the way--Ron Franz and the hippies, for instance--are carried almost verbatim from the book to the movie, and they are also executed well here. The book doesn't have Hal Holbrook delivering a phenomenal Franz performance, but it does allow the reader to emotionally connect with the minor characters, and sense their anxiety over Chris's abandonment of his family. The farms of South Dakota are also portrayed well, as Chris's work ethic in comparison to other wanderers is described in more detail. Much more detail is given to how poorly McCandless planned the Alaskan expedition, how he died, and how the natives of the state reacted (rightly and wrongly) to his blunders.

But the glaring flaw of the book is much of its midsection. There was absolutely no reason that it had to talk about many other travelers, whose circumstances were only tangentially related to McCandless' (or even Krakauer's.) Those chapters completely distracted from the book and added almost nothing to it.

However, due to the outstanding content of the rest of the book, which supplemented the content of the movie very well and both helped me loathe McCandless' disrespect for his family (as much as their own failings stood out) and his haphazard planning and execution of his trip, but also allowed me to identify a lot with his free spirit and intellectual nature, these chapters only subtract one star from an outstanding work.

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Great book by talented writer

I enjoyed the movie, but I was happy to read the book. An excellent author Jon Krakauer not only tells more true stories about young people, challenged by their free spirits and adventures nature, but also makes a good point on why they do it. It is a great choice for older teens and up, parents or any adventures sole.
I also recommend his breathtaking story "Into Thin Air".

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

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