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.
That's the first paragraph of Jon Krakauer's gripping book Into the Wild (published one year before his best-selling Into Thin Air). If those two sentences don't grab you by the eyeballs and keep them glued to the page, then I suggest a visit to your optometrist is in order.
I was hooked by Krakauer's narrative from the start, but for a different reason. When Christopher McCandless, the ill-fated young man, disappeared into the wild landscape of Interior Alaska, I was living just 150 miles to the north in Fairbanks. When the unidentified, decaying body was found by hunters that summer, it made state headlines. "How sad,"" we all thought. Then, as the mystery deepened, we thought, "How intriguing."" But when we learned that McCandless had wanted to leave civilization behind and plunge headlong into the isolated wilderness, many of us thought, "How stupid."".
Taking McCandless' story at the face value of newspaper accounts, I'll admit I was one of the finger-pointers who denounced the brash young man. After reading Krakauer's account, however, I have a better understanding of what made McCandless tick. Krakauer puts a human face on the tabloid headline and it becomes a tale that's alternately harrowing, sad and mystifying. We may never understand the method behind McCandless' madness, but Into the Wild paints a vivid portrait, stroke by stroke, of a confused young man on a fatal sojourn.
McCandless came from a rich family and had graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990. But he also had a restless spirit. Wanderlust overwhelmed him. To his relatives, his behavior grew increasingly odd and troublesome. He gave away his trust fund to charity, he cut all ties to his family, he burned the cash in his wallet, and finally he set off across America on a quest for moral rigor and asceticism (sparked by reading the writings of Leo Tolstoy).
