Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Into the Wild
Book Review: A Lone Young Man Vanishes Into The Alaskan Wilderness
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is an excellent "page turner" quick read. What has happened to Chris? Where is he going? How did he get there? Where has he been? Yet the biggest question of all at the end is why? Each reader has an opportunity to try to solve the mystery of why in his own perspective. Many readers will be able to identify with Chris in his search for meaning in life.Book Review: A Moving Story
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first bought this book, I bought it not because I wanted to but because I had to read it for my English Composition class. The cover of the book already intrigued me and I could not wait to get started on reading the book. After reading the book, I feel like I've gotten to know the main character, Chris McCandless so well. This book is a must read for all the adventure seekers out there for it shows the extreme side of the word "adventure." Chris' story forces the reader to question himself in so many countless ways that it boggles the mind.Book Review: A New Perspective
Summary: 4 Stars
Over the summer after the 7th grade, I started to read a book called Into the Wild. But I was never really the kind of person that could actually sit down and really read; I always had to be doing something active, so I never finished reading it. Then this past summer I found the book and decided that since I had nothing better to do, I would give it another try. I can't remember every little detail, but I do remember that it was really the only book I have ever read that actually made me think. It's a true story about a guy who was smart, and was heading towards a successful future. But to him, something was missing. He didn't have a great relationship with his father; he didn't have a girlfriend, or even many friends. So he decided he would go "into the wild", maybe to find something he was looking for. His journey took him into a forest in Alaska, and after several days he died there. Later his journal and camera were found, that included a picture of an old abandon buss he had been living in. This book had a profound effect on me, because I really started to understand that you can have everything and still be unhappy, or you can be fortunate and still want more out of life. Even though his decision to leave his life and the people that loved him may have seemed selfish, I found myself respecting what he was trying to do. Of course that doesn't mean I would make the same decisions, but it definitely gave me a new perspective.Book Review: A Page Turner
Summary: 5 Stars
I learned about this book while on a trip to Alaska recently. Our pilot on an 8-seater flight around Mt. McKinley (Denali to the locals)told us about it and then amazingly flew us low over the river and bus that are an integral part of the book's story. Afterwards, I bought a copy of the book in Anchorage, and as I read it, I could remember seeing where many of the events took place, even the spots in and near Healy, Alaska, where our flight originated and ended. The visual memories really breathed life into the tale, but even without having seen the sites, the book is an amazing read. Highly recommended.Book Review: A Story That Touches One's Soul
Summary: 5 Stars
This slim account of the quixotic life and tragic death of Chris McCandless is a remarkable book. I was transfixed by this story, one that chronicled the wanderings and explorations of a young man across the American West and into the wild of the Alaskan interior.
I found the book moved me in ways I hardly expected. This is surely a testament to the skilled and sensitive writing of Krakauer. He was able to transport me into the beauty and terror of this man's trek through desert, mountains, and taiga. I am an urban creature, who only on occasion has traveled the guided trail in a state park. Yet, I was swept along in the wake of McCandless's more exotic and often times harrowing trails through places like Detrital Wash, Arizona, Carthage, South Dakota and Stampede Trail, Alaska. As detailed an eye Krakauer has in making the flora and fauna of the West come alive for the reader, it is the human story of yearning and loss that made this much more than a tale of man alone in the wilderness.
Krakauer could have sold many copies of this story without probing the depths and mysteries of Chris McCandless's life. Instead, the author served up a complex potrtrait of a young man in his 20s estranged from his parents and hell bent on his search for truth and an unfettered life free from his suburban Washington D.C. upbringing and the rules and regulations of modern society. This story easily could have lapsed into a cliched tale of another On the Road Kerouac figure or a latter day Thoreau seeking self-discovery. While there are elements of these types in the character of McCandless, Krakauer draws a much more complex and compelling person for us to ponder.
At times I wanted to shake McCandless and tell him what the hell was he doing abrubtly leaving his family and cutting off all ties with former friends as he sought a purer, freer life. How self-absorbed and typically adolescent of him to be so wrapped up in his own angst to ignore the friends and family he left behind. Yet, as Krakauer deftly demonstrates McCandless was capabale of great compassion and a sense of responsibility when he met up with a variety of characters along the way. I was especially moved by the tender and caring relationship fostered between him and an 80 year old man in the desert of the Southwest. McCandeless engendered affection, concern, and endearment in a lonely soul still grieving for his own son killed in an automobile accident. The fact that McCandless has to move on and leave behind the offers of emotional and financial assistance evokes more pathos than anger in the reader. Time and time again McCandless has a beguiling charm on the people he meets and the caring relationships he makes in the borderlands of the West. At these moments I wanted to hug McCandless and be a brother to him, affriming his need to explore and search while also reminding him that people need him and he needs the human community despite all of its shortcomings.
Yet, McCandless seems destined to go his own way, ignoring both the advice of seasoned travellers he meets along the way as well as the admomishments of the readers of this story such as myself who begin to deeply care for this person. It is heart wrenching to read about McCandless's final days in the Alaskan wilderness, holed up in an abandoned school bus with his copy of Tolstoy by his side as he slowly starves to death. By this point I could no longer be frustrated with all of McCandless's mistakes and shortcomings. Rather, I was left with a profound sense of loss for a gifted and troubled soul, who with a little bit of luck, could have make it back to the human society he so needed to escape. The tragic irony is that McCandless seemed to have wanted to make that return journey, but the natural wild he had so embraced would not let him go.
In the end this story's power lies in its ability to force each of us to reflect upon the paths we have taken in life. While McCandless was his own person and surely belied easy pop psychology labels, his tragic death and the nuanced story Krakauer tells makes one pause and take stock of the choices each of us have made in our life.
Alan Stoskopf Brookline, Ma.