Into the Wild

I've always been fascinated with mountains. Not sure why...maybe it's the beauty. Maybe it's that I grew up in Kansas and rarely got to see peaks. Or maybe it's because mountains are wild, free and natural places....places that are still uncontrolled and dangerous. Pretty....and possibly deadly. Whatever the reason, I devour books, documentaries and films about famous mountains -- K2, Mount Everest, etc -- and famous (and infamous) expeditions. Dyetlov pass. Deaths on Everest. Calamities on K2. Alaskan wilderness tales. I find it fascinating that some are brave enough to challenge the toughest, wildest places on earth. Sometimes they are triumphant and return home fulfilled until the next adventure....and sometimes they fail and never return home at all.

Chris McCandless was such a brave soul. He tramped around the western United States for a couple years before venturing up to Alaska. He wanted to live off the land, wanted to be free, wanted to find his spiritual peace. But, he was ill prepared, made mistakes, and the Alaskan wilderness is unforgiving. Chris McCandless died in an old abandoned bus near an old mining road called The Stampede Trail. Into the Wild is about his life and his death.

Having read Jon Krakauer's book about an ill-fated trip up Mount Everest that ended in the deaths of several climbers, I knew he would present an unbiased story about McCandless. And, I was not disappointed. Krakauer doesn't just talk about McCandless starving to death alone in the Alaskan bush. He shares information from the young man's journals, his life, his thoughts on humanity......

I listened to the audio book version of this story. Narrated by Phillip Franklin, the audio is just over seven hours long. I listened slowly and paused often to let things sink in. I tried to understand McCandless and his motives. In the end, I believe he had a good heart....a pure heart...and wanted more from life than making money and accumulating "stuff.'' He wanted to live, love, exist on a higher plane than that....he wanted to prove he could be strong, could take care of himself, and that he could live without modern conveniences or money. He just came too early, stayed too long, made mistakes.....

Great book. It's definitely an emotional story. As a mother it was hard for me to listen to some of the details. If my son starved to death in an abandoned bus in the wilderness.....I'm not sure my sanity would remain intact. But it's also a tale of strength of conviction....a man who was willing to risk his life to live the way he wanted to live. But I think in the end, his undoing was reading too much into the writings of men who talked the talk but didn't entirely walk the walk ... Henry David Thoreau and Jack London specifically. McCandless truly believed he could walk into the wilderness and survive...that he had the strength and human spirit necessary to subsist on his own without anybody else. That is noble.....but very difficult to sustain for long periods of time without adequate supplies and more knowledge than Candless possessed.

I'm so glad I read this book! It's a bittersweet story, but McCandless lived and died by his own rules. And, despite his life being cut short, I feel he was successful. He became the type of man he wanted to be....and in the end, that's all anyone can really hope for.

Jon Krakauer has written two other books about mountain climbing: Into Thin Air and Eiger Dreams. I loved Into Thin Air. And Eiger Dreams is on my TBR list.

"Not all those who wander are lost" seems to be the focus of this non-fiction biography by Krakauer about a young man named Chris McCandless who went into the Alaskan wilderness, but never came out again. Krakauer examines McCandless' history, friendships, and probable motivations while also comparing his case to other young men who died or disappeared in the wilderness. He also gets very personal and recounts a solo mountain climbing adventure of his own that nearly went south, but didn't- crediting his survival to luck rather than skill. Into the Wild paints McCandless as a man with a brilliant mind and the soul of an artist, who didn't fit in to the modern world's or his family's view of how he was supposed to be.

"In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters." pg 10, ebook. For much of the book, Krakauer tries to figure out what ultimately ended McCandless's life. In the edition I read, he had a new afterword that he penned in April 2015, talking about his definitive theory for why McCandless died. If you haven't read the book since it was published, I really recommend picking up a new edition if only to read that.

Krakauer includes actual journal entries from McCandless's wanderings, which I thought gave us a pretty clear window into the man's mind: "It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you." pg 37, ebook. We saw a man who cared about life, about the way he was living, and about the way he interacted with others.

It is curious to me that his relationship with his parents wasn't better, but I'll let Krakauer tell you all about it: "McCandless's personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim do-gooder who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and then and was an incorrigible ham." pg 95

As interesting as McCandless's story is, my favorite part of this book was Krakauer's experience solo climbing the Devil's Thumb in Alaska. "By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence- the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes- all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand." pg 115, ebook. That passage made me wonder- what sorts of things do I like to do in my life as much as Krakauer loves climbing? It seems to me, that the state of flow he's describing there, would be a place that I would like to dwell in as much as possible.

Recommended for folks who like to read about people with unconventional life styles or if you're looking for a book about the human spirit. Into the Wild is a book about why people wander, what they may find, and, sadly, the loved ones they leave behind. Some further reading: Naked and Marooned: One Man. One Island., Man's Search for Meaning, or A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment.

I decided to squeeze this in to my year of Alaska and Canada reading. This might be Jon Krakauer at his best, because he has a personal connection to the story of Chris McCandless and his fatal trek into the Alaskan wilderness. He lets the facts speak for themselves and is deeply respectful of all involved. He doesn't glorify Chris/Alex as many do, but he also doesn't dismiss him as an idiot. He really probes into what drove him, and what has driven others who have died in various wildernesses. I appreciated the inclusion of quotations from the books Chris was reading.

Several people have pointed out that there is a book written by Chris McCandless's sister Carine (The Wild Truth), and that looks worthwhile, although I don't think I'll get to it in 2018.

There is a pretty great site with photos and other accounts kept maintained by his family and the foundation they started.

What a dumbass.

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild is a 1996 non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. The book was adapted to film in 2007, directed by Sean Penn with Emile Hirsch starring as McCandless (Christopher Johnson McCandless 1968 - 1992, a young, and wise man left his family and friends and headed off into the wilderness).

Into the Wild addresses the issues of how to be accepted into society, and how finding oneself sometimes conflicts with being an active member in society. Most critics agree that Chris McCandless left to find some sort of enlightenment. He also tries to find his way in the wild with minimal material possessions, because "it made the journey more enjoyable."

His extreme risk-taking was the hubris which eventually led to his downfall. Chris McCandless was influenced by transcendentalism and the need to "revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience."

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و پنجم ماه نوامبر سال2012میلادی

عنوان: به سوی سرزمین سفید؛ نویسنده: جان کراکائور؛ مترجم: یحیی خویی؛ تهران، قطره، سال1391، در320 ص؛ شابک9786001195877؛ موضوع: سرگذشتنامه کر��ستوفر جانسون مکندلیس - ماجراجویان - ایالات متحده - رهنوردان آلاسکا - از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

بسوی طبیعت وحشی (به سوی سرزمین سفید)، کتابی ناداستان، و بنوشته ای از «جان کراکائر (کراکائور)» است، که نخستین بار در سال1996میلادی، منتشر شده‌ است؛ این کتاب، بر اساس نگاره ی9000کلمه‌ ای نویسنده، درباره ی زندگی «کریستوفر مک‌ کندلس»، و با عنوان «مرگ یک بی‌گناه»، که در شماره ی ماه ژانویه ی مجله ی «آوتساید»، چاپ شده بود، به نگارش درآمده است؛ در سال2007میلادی نیز، اقتباسی سینمایی از آن، به کارگردانی «شان پن»، و با بازی «امیل هرش»، با عنوان «بسوی طبیعت وحشی» ساخته شد

تاریخبهنگام رسانی 10/03/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 04/01/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Into the Wild is the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who decided to abandon his family and his wealth and hitchhike across America. He ended up attempting to spend a summer living in the Alaskan bush, and his body ended up being discovered over two weeks after he starved to death.
This is a really interesting story for anyone who likes Jack London or Thoreau (or doesn't really want to read those authors), but unfortunately, there's not quite enough information about McCandless to fill a book. By the time I got to the middle of the book I already knew all about the subject's family, childhood, and life story of everyone he met on his travels. When Krakauer began telling the stories of two different men who had embarked on travels similar to McCandless's, I got the impression that the author was struggling to complete his desired page count. By the time I'd finished Krakauer's two-chapter description of the time he climbed a mountain in Alaska, I knew he was struggling to complete his desired page count.
Honestly, this story works better as a two-hour movie.

Chris McCandless had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder!! This is not a spoiler; it's my interpretation of the evidence provided by the author. McCandless had OCD. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild is objectively written (more on the written word later), and goes to great length—medically, pharmacologically, and, especially, psychologically—to explain what happened to this 24 year old when he traipsed into the Alaskan bush under-equipped with 20 pounds of gear, mostly dry rice and books.

I'm not a subject matter expert, so you can drill holes through my untrained theory. However, I've lived 40 years with a close relative that has OCD. The suffering has been overwhelming for this individual and our family. I believe this gives me enough credibility to lean into the psychology, and participate in the discussion on what drove Chris McCandless repeatedly—like a ritual—into the wild.

We're familiar with the most common manifestations of OCD—washing, collecting, counting—all ritualistic behavior performed invariably by highly-functioning, competent, otherwise rational people, always against their will and better judgment, capable of being controlled, yet incapable of being stopped. Though we recognize common forms, there's myriad other shades of OCD that have been documented in professional literature. Indeed, as each individual is a unique analysand, it's reasonable to say that there's a unique OCD for every person that has OCD; or, rather, that each individual performs his OCD in a unique combination of ways. They merely manifest in common vectors. My relative has a diagnosed OCD that doesn't fit into a category, and I believe Chris McCandless probably had an undiagnosed OCD that descended upon him repeatedly, uncontrollably and made a rational person do irrational things.

Krakauer's investigative prowess is superior. The author, in fact, claims he was obsessed with this story because he, too, shared a similar 'obsession' to retreat to the woods. So, Krakauer has done his homework. He arrives at what possibly could be the real physiological reason why McCandless died, and I agree. Krakauer also provides a detailed personal profile kluged together after doggedly uncovering people who interacted with McCandless in the period before he crossed the Rubicon. However, although the author tinkers with the psychological reasons why McCandless may have behaved the way he did, he ultimately leaves the final analysis undecided. Into the Wild was written for you, the reader, to supply that analysis.

McCandless was not a social misfit, a 'green' anarchist, a criminal, a Virgina Tech “shooter.” He was completely normal, with what appeared to be a common level of vexation against his parents and angst with society. However, his acute withdrawal into the woods without a rational mix of gear and ration occurred with enough regularity that it seemed to be ritualistic with him. Indeed, the author describes these repeated withdrawals as a kind of vision quest, a catharsis, a cleansing. But what psychology explains a recurring, irrational, overpowering urge performed by an otherwise normal person? An obsessive compulsive disorder.

I'd like to launch into a lengthy comparison of Scott McCandless and my relative, but—in jeopardy to my thesis—that will remain with me. Just read the book, and keep OCD in mind, and see if you feel the same way.

New words: cordillera, contumacious, lumpen, eremitic, desideratum, serac, coppice.

I award 4 stars for a well-paced, well-presented, investigative journey with a language that was engaging and highly readable. It could have earned the 5th star, but there were absolutely no maps, sketches, pictures, or images of a story that certainly warranted them.

Not quite what I was expecting, thank goodness it was short. The movie is much better!