Moreover, ''engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others,'' Mr.
I didn't yet experience its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.'' From his experience he concludes: ''At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidian geometry
McCandless, the author survived his mad adventure, although in his view he probably didn't deserve to. The accumulatedĬlutter 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 dreams - all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughtsīy an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.'' ''A trancelike state settles over your efforts the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream,'' he writes. Passages that rival the best in mountaineering literature.
#Into the wild book rating full
What follows is a terrifying account of the author's own desperate venture, full of More precisely, he decided to plunge himself into the Alaskan wilderness and climb a mountain, the Devil's Thumb, by a route that had never been taken before. How he too acted out his rebellion by throwing himself into the arms of nature. Krakauer reveals how he too was once the rebellious son of a loving but overbearing father and
So one hates to give any of the mystery away.īut certainly among the most moving chapters in the book are the two in which the author discloses why he identified with his subject so strongly. The last one falls into place in the final pages. McCandless's life and death is that of artfully withholding the pieces of his puzzle until Krakauer displays in his reconstruction of Mr. What is it that finally pushes you off the fence? On which side of it do you fall? Yet another skill that Mr. The wilderness that often articulate acutely what Mr. He introduces each of his 18 chapters and his epilogue with quotations from the literature of McCandless's many forerunners who were driven to climb mountains too high, plumb wastelands too deep or brave elements too unforgiving. McCandless during his flight how particularly intelligent, unusual and just plain likable this young man was. He reveals through the eyes of many who met Mr. While conceding his subject's many flaws, he keeps hinting that something was special about thisĬase. Krakauer too readily exposes his subject's shortcomings, he also does a masterly job of keeping the reader's condemnation at bay. Of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill - just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed.Īs one angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: ''While I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. In short, at least at the beginning of ''Into the Wild,'' you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Mr. Not even offer speculation about some heroic psychic drama his subject might have been unconsciously acting out. McCandless's refusal to tell his devoted family his whereabouts after he graduated with honors from Emory University in 1990 and set off on his cockeyed hegira. More, the idealism that prompted this fatal romantic adventure appears both flawed and badly articulated, amounting as it does to phrases like ''plastic people'' and the need to ''revolutionize your lifeĪnd move into an entirely new realm of experience,'' and cliched affirmations that writers like Tolstoy, Thoreau and Jack London were leading him on. McCandless's story unfolds in these pages, he seems to have been lacking in both adequate supplies and proper know-how when he waved goodbye to a trucker who had given him a lift and tramped off into the bush on April 28, 1992. Readers may at first have some trouble sympathizing with Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young man whose mysterious death in the Alaska wilderness Jon Krakauer explores so movingly in his new book, '' Into the Wild.''Īs Mr.
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