I think a lot of the people who have formed negative opinions of this story are really missing the point. Most people rage on and on about what a terribly selfish, careless idiot Chris McCandless was, to which I say, duh. John Krakauer points out many, many times that Chris was "heedless" and "overconfident." I never once felt that Krakauer idolized him or tried to make him into a hero. He was fascinated by McCandless, sure, and he certainly seems to have seen a lot of himself in the young man, but by no means does he gush about what a fantastic person or brave adventurer McCandless was.

Chris McCandless is fascinating to me because, despite how frustratingly foolhardy and arrogant he may come across (who's to say really - none of us ever knew him), I am astounded by the number of people who fell head over heels for him in such a short period of time. Grown men and women! It seems impossible that his flaws outweighed his character. The people he met over the course of his travels genuinely seemed to love him, but Chris was just one of those strange individuals who don't really want to be loved.

I do hope his parents and sister were able to find peace with McCandless's death. It's very hard to keep giving away your love to someone who simply doesn't want it.

I don't know why everyone went so wild over this book or this kid - is there one without the other? It seems like people only cared because it was a Jon Krakauer book that translated well to Hollywood. The guy in the book didn't even have enough material about himself to make a whole book and every other chapter is about some other person who did a similar "disappearance into nature." Dying because you don't know how to take care of yourself in the wild is no reason for society to glorify your life.

Biographical novel about Chris McCandless, a smart 23 year old boy who starts an idealistic journey throughout the forests and deserts of the States and Mexico trying to live accordingly to his Tolstoian beliefs, which denounce all kind of material possessions. The adventure ends up in tragedy when his body is found in Alaska two years after his departure. This story aroused a mediatic debate in the nineties in which some people defended McCandless innocent and pure search for spiritual peace whereas others considered him a stupid, reckless and overconfident well-to-do kid from a rich family who wanted nothing else but to draw attention.

The novel flows easy and fast, and I can't think of a better narrator than Krakauer, he exposes the facts in an objective way and leaves the reader to form his own opinion about McCandless: a spoiled, immature kid whose life could have been spared or a free mind who found his own way in a frantic world and who managed to leave track.

As a romantic I prefer the second option, but I also agree with Krakauer that youth combined with passionate ideals and some deep hidden frustration can lead to oblivion of danger, we humans do easily forget that we are not invincible.

After having read this novel, I believe that living to the limit and suicide are not the same concept, and I also think that McCandless thougth the same. He didn't want to die, but died happily all the same, which is an attitude we might all learn something about.

"Happiness only real when shared"

"He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God"

This book has rave reviews, but I didn't find it to be all that riveting. I tried watching the movie, and just couldn't get into it, and stopped watching after about 15 minutes.

It's about this young man (24) who gives away his college money, abandons his family, and goes to Alaska. Here's what the author said in an interview, "I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I’ve also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death."

So, as you can see, there are two schools of thought regarding Chris McCandless.

There is also debate as to why he died ... starvation alone, or malnutrition coupled with ingesting a toxic seed.

The author took his journals and constructed this book ... sort of ... read this article to find out how much of the book was 'fleshed out' by the author.
The fiction that is Jon Krakauer's 'Into The Wild'

It's really more of a 2.5 Stars for me, but I'll bump it up to 3 Stars.

3 Stars = I liked the book.

I thought this book was honestly terrible. It was practically impossible to read because of how boring it was. I wish the author didn’t start the book with the end of the story. The author could have built up to the plot and end much better in my opinion.

کتابی بود که خوندم تا یه همچین ادمی رو درک کنم.اما نتونستم که هیچی ،بدتر احساس کردم واقعا مشکل از اونائه نه من.اما خوب این مسئله نیست چون بالاخره کریس ادم متفاوتی(واقعا متفاوتی) بود و به سختی حتی میتونستم به خودم بقبولونم که این کتاب واقعیه.واقعا یه همچین فردی بوده
انقدر سنگین بود که به زور خوندمش.سنگین از این نظر که بالاخره زندگی یه ادم بود.داستان یه خانواده که چیز بزرگی رو از دست دادن
با این حال احساس میکنم شاید الان متوجه نشم اما این کتاب عوضم کرده.حتی شایدم فقط یه کم
پنج تا ستاره هم به خاطر اینکه چطوری میشه به همچین حقیقت تلخی کمتر از این ستاره داد؟

For those who read this book I saw this on the news yesterday, June 19, 2020, and thought you would be interested:

An abandoned 1940s Fairbanks city bus that became a popular tourist attraction after the 2007 film Into the Wild was airlifted out of the remote Alaskan wilderness by an Army National Guard helicopter on Thursday, Alaskan Public Media reports. The bus, which had sat by the Teklanika River near Denali National Park since the 1960s, sheltered adventurer Chris McCandless until he died in 1992, as depicted in the film by actor Emile Hirsch. While the bus was first made famous after Jon Krakauer wrote about McCandless in the 1990s, there were many reported incidents of tourists needing to be rescued from the remote backcountry where it resided in the years following the film’s release.

According to Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Corri Feige, there were 15 costly search-and-rescue missions related to the bus between 2009 and 2017. In 2019, a Belarus woman died trying to cross the Teklanika River to get to the bus, and another visitor drowned in the river in 2010. “We encourage people to enjoy Alaska’s wild areas safely, and we understand the hold this bus has had on the popular imagination,” Feige said in a statement. “However, this is an abandoned and deteriorating vehicle that was requiring dangerous and costly rescue efforts, but more importantly, was costing some visitors their lives. I’m glad we found a safe, respectful and economical solution to this situation.”
For the film, writer-director Sean Penn had his Production Designer Derek R Hill design an exact replica bus, and the crew shot 50 miles south of where the real bus stood. Denali Borough Mayor Clay Walker said the real bus will be kept for now in “safe storage.”

(from: https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/real-... )




Even though it was many years ago that I read this book, I remember I enjoyed it immensely. I also saw the movie...sad.

In this short book by a pre-eminent outdoors writer, one experiences an American tragedy – the saga of a smart, idealistic, and profoundly misguided young man. Christopher McCandless, a talented young university graduate from an affluent suburban family, turned his back on “traditional” ideas of American success, cut ties with his family, gave away all his money, and went West, seeking a transcendent experience in the isolation of the Alaskan wilderness – but instead found an early death from starvation. In his 1996 book Into the Wild, writer and outdoorsman Jon Krakauer tells the story of this young man, Christopher McCandless, in a compelling and dramatic manner.

From the time of his childhood, Krakauer harboured a passion for mountain-climbing, and his books have often combined an appreciation for the beauty and glory of the outdoors with a cautionary quality – a plea to the reader to understand that the wilderness can be as dangerous and unforgiving as it is beautiful. These themes apply to Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s 1997 account of surviving a disastrous 1996 attempt to climb Mount Everest, as well as they apply to Into the Wild.

Into the Wild developed from an article about McCandless that Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in 1993; the article generated more letters-to-the-editor responses than any other article in the history of the magazine. The dramatic, almost archetypal quality of the story of Chris McCandless’s life and death makes it understandable that reader interest in the story would be so intense.

The early chapters of Into the Wild chronicle Chris McCandless’s upbringing in a well-to-do household in the tony D.C.-area suburb of Annandale, Virginia. His relationship with his parents was always somewhat fraught, but they seem to have thought that he might be finding his life path when he attended Emory University in Atlanta and graduated with excellent grades. After his graduation from Emory, however, Chris McCandless abandoned his law-school plans, gave away all his money, and headed west, leaving his parents no forwarding address: he simply disappeared from their lives. He must have felt, Krakauer suggests, that “At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence” (p. 22).

He even gave himself a new name – “Alexander Supertramp.” While Krakauer does not speculate on the meaning of the name, the first name “Alexander” seems clearly enough an indicator of an ambition to conquer new worlds. At first, I thought the last name “Supertramp” might mean that Chris McCandless was a fellow fan of the British progressive-rock band of Breakfast in America fame; but in fact, the name was probably inspired by the book Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) by W.H. Davies, a Welsh writer who had spent years living the rootless life of a “tramp” in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States of America. Perhaps Chris McCandless hoped that he, like Davies, could be an outstanding success in the transient lifestyle – a “super-tramp.” Unfortunately, his hopes would go unrealized.

Krakauer seeks to understand Chris’s iconoclastic and adventurous spirit, even while critiquing the impractical aspects of Chris’s quest for meaning and fulfillment – the manner in which Chris’s idealism was, all too often, unencumbered by any degree of realism or critical thinking. Toward that end, Krakauer quotes extensively from the journal in which Chris described his wild adventures.

At one point, Chris McCandless befriended an older gentleman, Ronald A. Franz (not his real name), who lived alone near the Salton Sea in inland California, and the story of their friendship reveals much about Krakauer’s feelings regarding Chris and his quest. Ronald Franz befriended Chris, gave him shelter, taught him leatherworking, and even eventually offered to adopt Chris as a grandson; but Chris refused to stay and insisted on pushing on with his plans of going north to Alaska.

Of this time from Chris’s odyssey, Krakauer writes that “When McCandless came into [Franz’s] world, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt” (p. 55).

Here, one of the major themes of Into the Wild begins to emerge – the idea that Chris McCandless’s quest, for all that it might appeal to many people’s visions of shaking off civilization’s restraints and seeking something more real, also has a profoundly selfish quality to it. That impression is reinforced by the breezy, preachy quality of McCandless’s later letters to the broken-hearted old man:

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but 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. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun….You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. (pp. 56-57)

Chris McCandless made another friend, a farmer and businessman named Wayne Westerberg, in Carthage, South Dakota, and worked for a time at Westerberg’s grain elevator. But Chris, though he was asked to stay, insisted on leaving for his Alaskan adventure, later writing to Westerberg that “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” (p. 68). It is from this letter, of course, that Krakauer takes the title for his book.

Background information on Chris McCandless’s parents, sister, and family life reinforces an impression that the reader is already likely to have gathered – that “It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory” (p. 106).

Krakauer says that, with his own history of adolescent conflicts with his father, and of being drawn to potentially risky outdoor activities, he finds that he can identify, in a number of ways, with Chris McCandless’s restless and inquiring spirit. He recalls, with regard to an ill-planned and near-disastrous mountain-climbing adventure that he endured on the Stikine Ice Cap in Alaska, that “at the age of 23, personal mortality – the idea of my own death – was still largely outside my conceptual grasp” (p. 150), and adds that “It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it” (p. 155). To those who assumed that Chris McCandless went out into the Alaskan wild in an act of elaborately staged slow-motion suicide, Krakauer, I think, would offer an alternative explanation. For Krakauer, Chris McCandless is an intelligent and talented - and at the same time, in some ways a woefully naïve - young man.

Chris McCandless’s final adventure involved his setting out along Alaska’s Stampede Trail, setting up in an old Fairbanks city bus that had been left out on the taiga as workers’ housing for a long-abandoned project, and seeking to live off the land by gathering edible plants and hunting game. While he lost a great deal of weight, as shown by photographs he took of himself over the course of his time in the bush, he seems to have maintained his health and his state of mind fairly well. But then one mistake and one fateful element of mischance set his adventure awry, and put him on a path toward his early death. Krakauer traces it all, even venturing out to the old Fairbanks City Bus #142 to see the place where Chris McCandless lived and died. His description of what he sees there is moving and evocative, as are his reflections upon the possible causes of Chris’s demise.

If you are going to read Into the Wild, then I would recommend that you seek out the 2015 edition of the book. Over the 19 years after the original publication of the book, Krakauer kept on coming back to the story of Chris McCandless. One gets the sense that, in spite of the wide variety of topics that Krakauer has addressed over the course of his career – “adventure tourism,” polygamy among some religious sects in the American West, sexual assault on college campuses – the saga of Chris McCandless may be the story that has stuck with him the most.

An emotional epilogue chronicles the time when Krakauer travelled with Chris’s mother and father to the Fairbanks City Bus #142 site. And a new afterword emphasizes how “The debate over what killed Chris McCandless, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering and occasionally flaring for more than two decades now” (p. 205). Through the afterword, one can trace the steps in Krakauer’s ongoing fascination with the Chris McCandless story:

•t2007: A feature-film adaptation of Into the Wild is released. The film – directed by Sean Penn, with a cast that includes Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Zach Galifianakis, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart, and Hal Holbrook, along with a musical soundtrack composed by Eddie Vedder – wins widespread critical acclaim and is nominated for two Academy Awards. In the same year, Krakauer publishes a new edition of the book, with a second possible explanation for Chris’s death. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that this new explanation relates to differing properties of alkaloids.

•t2013: After reading an online article that offered a third possible explanation for Chris’s death, Krakauer initiates a new round of chromatographic research and publishes on the New Yorker website an article titled “How Chris McCandless Died.” The article is criticized for not constituting or incorporating peer-reviewed research. Krakauer continues with further chromatographic research and testing.

•t2014: Krakauer co-authors, with four doctorate-bearing scholars, an article that is published in the peer-reviewed journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. This article sets forth a fourth possible cause for the death of Chris McCandless – one that (and again, I am trying to avoid the need for a spoiler alert) relates to amino acids rather than alkaloids.

All of this speaks to the fascination that the Chris McCandless story has held for Jon Krakauer. It may hold the same sort of fascination for you, too. For my part, I found that I could relate to Chris McCandless in a number of ways. Like Chris, I grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.; and while I knew and appreciated how my parents had worked hard to give me and my siblings that comfortable suburban lifestyle, I couldn’t help seeing in it all a certain measure of intellectual and spiritual sterility.

I know that when I was in my early twenties, I could be arrogant, self-righteous, self-focused, and judgmental. We can probably all think of poor and risky decisions that we made at that time in our lives – but most of us have the good fortune to survive, and learn from, our youthful mistakes. What makes Chris McCandless different from many of us is perhaps a matter of degree rather than kind: his luck ran out, whereas, for most of us, our luck held.

Into the Wild is the sort of book that gets one thinking very hard about such things. If only one could talk about these issues with Christopher McCandless – who, at the time that I write this review from a ship anchored in a glacial bay in Alaska, would, if he were still living, be 55 years old, perhaps with children of his own.

This book got me riveted in the tragic story of Chris McCandless, a young man who left his family and friends, abandoned most of his material possessions, went to the Alaska wilderness and perished there. The author does a great job of portraying McCandless complex personality through meticulous research based on interviews, letters and journal entries. The writing is so engaging that although it is already clear from the beginning how McCandless' story would end, I was hooked till the last page. Krakauer only digresses when discussing his own high-risk undertaking and those of ill-fated adventurers similar to McCandless — these parts offer comparison to McCandless' character but I found myself getting impatient and wanting them to end quickly, to return to the main story itself which is much more compelling.

Readers have been divided with regard to this story. Some admire McCandless' daring and idealism; some others say he was stupid, reckless and arrogant enough to have gone to Alaska without sufficient preparation. I think he was a human being with faults and merits, but I have to admit I felt something stirring in me when I read this passage, taken from a letter he wrote to a friend:

"...make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation... The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure."

The passage resonates with me because my life has been filled with stagnation and inactivity. I am the queen of conventionalism. I don't consider myself unhappy, but I'm always afraid of moving outside the comfort zone, of expanding further than my own comfortable little shell. I often don't exert myself to my best capabilities because halfhearted efforts seemed good enough. When I read about McCandless, I noticed that one of his admirable traits is if he wanted something he went out and did it. He was not afraid of challenges, the greater they are the better. Jason Mraz says "live high, live mighty, live righteously". I think that was what McCandless did: he lived up to his ideals.

One the other hand, the greatest tragedy of McCandless' life, in my opinion, was his conflicting feelings toward human intimacy and relationship. He clashed with his parents and others who didn't share his beliefs to the point that he spurned humanity and sought nature and the wilderness instead. But even during his solitary journeys he met a lot of people and connected with them, touching their lives as well as his own. His final odyssey in Alaska had probably made him realize, more than ever, the raw need for companionship, but he didn't survive that trip — causing endless grief to his family. So in the end, if there is something I can take from McCandless story, it is this message: Be bold. Get out there. Do something. But don't forget those who love you.

In this book, the author has struck a healthy balance between Christopher's sense of adventure and reckless foolhardiness. The writing is simple, beautiful, poignant; it leaves you torn between joy and sorrow. The desire to discard human society to return to the wild and live in harmony with nature is timeless and universal. In the East, we see this among the sages; in the West, among the rebels.

Both come with their costs, born mostly by family members and close friends. At the end, both come to see, in their unique ways, that humans have to live in harmony with the societies they've created. This happened with Buddha. This happened with Cristopher.

The differences between them are the following. Buddha survived because of his moderation, learned from his 11 years in the forest, then returned to society and helped others to resolve their existential problems. Christopher, from his extreme position, deprived himself and lost his life. We don't know whether he truly found what he sought, but we do know he left his close people in great anxiety.

That is the lesson I retained from this book.

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.
A really gripping "travel essay" Jon Krakauer tries to move his reading audience beyond pre-conceived notions. What would convince a young man to give up all his worldly possessions and head back into nature? Upon closing the pages, I felt a little bit of sadness that Chris McCandless left the earth way too soon. But in his short life, Chris managed to touch a lot of people along the way and it is their memories of this man that were the best parts.

"No eches raíces, no te establezcas. Cambia a menudo de lugar, lleva una vida nómada, renueva
cada día tus expectativas [...] No necesitas tener a alguien contigo para traer una nueva luz a tu vida. Está ahí fuera, sencillamente, esperando que la agarres, y todo lo que tienes que hacer es el gesto de alcanzarla. Tu único enemigo eres tú mismo y esa terquedad que te impide cambiar las circunstancias en que vives".
Al inicio de la novela, el autor comenta las contrarias opiniones que se han generado hacia Chris McCandless, desde considerarlo un héroe hasta un irresponsable y narcisista. Imparcialmente, nos relata toda la historia y pide al lector su opinión. En mi caso, no hay duda. Quizás algún día venzamos esa terquedad y el miedo que nos ata, sintamos la llamada de lo salvaje y cojamos una mochila con provisiones y, por qué no, un mapa, para poner rumbo a lo desconocido; sólo así podremos conocernos a nosotros mismos y conectar con el mundo que nos ha sido prestado.