“A tremendous book. Krakauer nails the story by following every clue he could find and interviewing everyone who seemed to have contact with this young man on his journey into the Alaskan wilderness. The story ends (or begins, depending on how you look at it) tragically, but the person whose story it is, Chris McCandless, touched several lives deeply along the way. Fueled by anger toward his parents, he strikes out on a quest to live off the land and criss-crosses the U.S. in preparation for a final trip into Alaska. There he makes his way into the wild and lives in an abandoned bus for several months before succumbing to starvation.
This book is about how he got there and who he met while he was living on his own. People remembered him. And Krakauer makes sure to mention how similar McCandless is to just about all of us, despite the reactions of people in the immediate wake of his death that condemned him for his stupidity and selfishness. It's just not that simple, and we learn why that's so in this book with looks into McCandless's childhood, Krakauer's own adventures at a similar age, and the disappearance of another "adventurer" in the 1930s. It's a book that can keep your attention if you're at all interested in what makes people tick, and what makes them do things that others would consider irrational.”
mrjerz wrote this review Wednesday, November 7 2007.
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