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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Into the Wild
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Anchor
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.98045
EAN: 9780385486804
ISBN: 0385486804
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 1997-01-20
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 1997-01-20
Studio: Anchor
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Editorial Reviews:
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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.  How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir.  In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his  cash.  He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented.  Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away.  Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.
Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life.  Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless.  Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.
When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris.  He is said  to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Enchanting
Comment: This book was amazing. It goes much further into the idealism of "going into the wild" then the story of Alex himself; unlike the movie. Recommend to any person ever willing to pass on the idea of society and return to our roots.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Into the wild review
Comment: This book was okay it wasn't all that great, but if you like an autobiography then this is the book for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hubristic fool
Comment: Unfortunately, I find this to be one of the most idiotic stories I have ever read. It is the story of a young man with no respect for the enormity of nature. His story is akin to waiting on a beach to watch a category 5 hurricane make landfall. I feel sorry for Chris' family
I love Krakauer's other books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Into the Wild
Comment: this is the story of chris mccandles. candles inherits money, then lights it on fire out of principle. he then travels the country excoriating people for not doing the same. in between stints working at mcdonalds, he ventures off into the wild with nothing but a gun and fishing pole. after almost dying repeatedly, he decides alaska is the only wilderness tough enough for him. he walks down a trail off the highway, wades across a stream, then starts writing a journal. he gets hungry and decides to go back, but is blocked by the ice-melt swollen stream. not realizing that getting upriver to a crossing point is now a matter of life or death, he goes back to his campground. something very bad then happens to him and he can't get out. the best parts of the book are the several chilling accounts of how seemingly innocuous mistakes cost some very tough people their lives all alone in the wilderness. the author will make you feel like you're about to die, that's how well written it is.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Evading the threat of human intimacy in immoderation
Comment: After watching and liking Sean Penn's movie version of this story, I didn't think I needed to read the book. My daughter told me otherwise. She said, the book has things that are missing in the film. And the book idolizes the hero less than the film does. She is right.
Krakauer was first hired by an outdoors magazine to write an article about the death of the young man in the Alaskan wilderness. He got hooked by this case, he says. One assumes after reading the book that the main attraction to him was the obvious similarity of Chris McC to himself: he tells us of his own daredevilish solo mountaineering adventure in Alaska, which he survived only by accident. Just as Chris failed to survive by accident.
JK identifies so strongly with Chris that he is sure that there was no death wish, no hidden suicide involved. He digs deep into the person that C. might have been, based on his diaries and on interviews with those who knew him. He tells us of other, similar cases, of survivors and of some who perished. He develops theories about the personalities of the type, without accepting some of the standard pet models, like the Oedipus version. He thinks that C., like not a few of those seduced by the wild, seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. The man enjoyed his 'suffering', the hardships from surviving in nature, and he did not want to die in the experiment. He even tried to proselytize and told others that joy of life comes from encounter with new experiences. (Which, by the way, I would partly buy into, but I know many many who think that their pleasure comes from avoiding surprises and new things.)
The role of the narrator Krakauer is missing in the film, which takes away the philosophical background and reduces it to a good plain story.
The film gives us Chris as a charmer who does odd things. The book is not quite so enthusiastic about him, shows more of his downsides, his monomania, his self-absorption, his impatience and unforgivingness. In short his overlong adolescence. The man died before he grew up.
Why did he die? Survival in the wilderness is tough, and he probably never believed in the concept of mortality as far as it concerned himself. He was not incompetent, but he made some stupid mistakes and had some bad luck.
And definitely Alaska does not seem to be the best place for eremitic experiments. Good thing to know for Hermits.
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