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Summary: makes you wish true-adventure mags still existed
Review: Every once in while I pull this book out of the shelf and accidentally end up reading it again. If magazines like "Argosy" (if that's the correct name...I remember reading old issues during summer vacations because my uncle subscribed to it) still existed, it'd be filled with Krakauer's stories. He has a way of adding a dash of the mystic into the reality. Although, sometimes you wish he weren't so endearingly sensitive about a victim's relatives, friends, etc. It'd be nice to read what he REALLY thinks. As it is, I've found nothing that compares to his approach when it comes to survival-adventure stories. Truly engrossing with the added benefit or twist of making you think and wonder about the subject throughout the years.
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Summary: excellent book!
Review: i found this book to be very thought provoking. its difficult not to feel a sense of closeness with mccandless. i highly recommend this book but the only thing i found disappointing were the chapters where krakauer described his own experiences. maybe i just wanted to hear more about mccandless but hey if youre into that kind of thing this is the book for you!
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Summary: A vagabond for beauty
Review: The person who gave me this book said they couldn't put it down, but I found myself having to put it down every few chapters because sections of it were so emotionally intense. McCandless, the young man whose story Krakauer pieces together, is both admirable and exasperating. On the one hand, he embodies a great many American values: idealism, a willingness to take risks, a wish for personal development and spiritual fulfillment, a love of nature and the outdoors, a romantic attachment to the open road, an egalitarian openness to the common man, a respect for hard physical labor, honesty, trust, loyalty, commitment to one's own vision. All of these attributes are wrapped up in a precocious, thoughtful, bright young man who charmed the strangers he met on the road, made them care about his welfare, and was even deeply loved. He is in many ways a modern-day Thoreau, a hero in the style of Joseph Campbell, following his bliss. On the other hand, McCandless is willful, heedless, self-indulgent, reluctant to become emotionally attached to other people, vindictive toward his parents, and unaware of the pain that his potential death could have on those who love him. In short, he is a fascinating psychological mystery, full of contradictions he seems unaware of. Many readers will dismiss him as a weirdo and the book as a waste of time, but I believe the best way to approach the book is to suspend judgement and simply read it as a character study of an amazingly complex human being. Ironically, like many a young man, McCandless puts his life on the line for the sake of adventure and one day may have written his own best-selling book about it if he'd only had the good luck to survive. Krakauer tells a wonderful story. The many people he interviews breathe with life and feeling, and the places he travels to are vividly described. Looking at his subject from many angles, he includes cameo biographies of other men who have met untimely ends in the wilderness, including Everett Ruess, another young man very similar to McCandless, who disappeared in the canyon country along the Colorado River in Utah in 1934. And he uses himself as an example, describing a youthful attempt to scale a forbidding Alaskan mountain in the dead of winter and capturing the nearly mindless devotion to an impossibly risky objective. If deliberately risking your life in a long-shot gamble at self-realization is your idea of something totally stupid, then you probably should stay away from this book. But I recommend it as a mesmerizing, haunting psychological study of an adolescent rite of passage. I also recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by wilderness and living off the land under conditions that are hazardous, forbidding and transportingly beautiful.
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Summary: This is a must read
Review: I literally could not put this book down, it kept me up too late. This story is fascinating. It was great to read about someone who had the guts to carry out his dreams. This kid just picks up one day and leaves home to adventure where he wants. His adventure leads him to the Dakotas to work and then on a kayak trip in the Gulf of Mexico and eventually to Alaska, where his life ends. In a way it is something I have always wanted to do, but have always been to scared to try. A story about someone who could put away the societal expectations placed on him and did what he wanted to do. Even though this book ends in tragedy I think a life was enjoyed to its fullest.
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Summary: A very intense book
Review: This book kept me turning the pages. It is amasing how the author was able to track this ypung mans activities.
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Summary: The Never Ending Book
Review: Into the Wild by John Kraukauer is a high and low book. When the book starts out it seems promising. It takes you through all the things that the boy, Chris McCandless went through on his journey to Alaska. As the book goes on it starts to get more and more boring. Then around page 100 or so the book starts to look up again and you want to continue reading. Then once you get through those pages and into pages 150 till the end, it seems as though the book drags on and on. It seems as if the authour just needed to fill some pages because he kept on writing. There are stories in the book that have nothing to do with the whole purpose of the book and you begin to feel as if the book should have never been published. Now although I am on 15 and having read the book for my high school, I think that other teens my age would find the book boring and worthless. I mean how many times can you explain how he met all the people he did. And how many times can you beat it into a persons head that he didnt like his family life. I mean once or twice is okay but when the book carries on about that you tend to get bored more easily. And also those other stories in the book, some of them are necceasary because they give you ideas on why he did what he did but when you have 2 whole chapters on someones story whose only parrallel is the father then you get bored too. That story should have been 10 pages tops not 25 or how ever long it was.
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Summary: The Best
Review: This is the best book I Have ever read. Number #1
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Summary: 10 Stars Must read.........
Review: This is one of those wonderful life changing books that teaches you what to do and what not to do, yet is so inspirational if you have a risk taking, march to your own drummer, but own your own drum way of thinking and living. Yes, it is sad. But it is also a very positive book and one that is so well written in the way places and times, people and goals are described that it is hard to put down. Few books I have ever read have had the hold on me, like this book and in part I think it is because as the author wrote "I won't claim to be an impartial biographer. McCadless's strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried--and largely succeeded, I think--to minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCadless's story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless". it has something about those of "us" who have had bits and pieces of Chris-Alex in us from as long as we can remember. The author is so gifted. Or maybe its because I have traveled many of the same roads he and Chris-Alex traveled and the words bring back such wonderful memories. Or maybe its because the book is a great reminder that we vagabonds aren't such a rarity as the establishment would like people to believe. All I know is I loved reading about a young man who as flawed and naive in many ways as he was, chose to break ties with those whom he felt didn't really care about his life and his goals, and instead of whining as so many people do about families they dislike, this young man decided he would be personally responsible for his own choices and his own destiny. And pay his own way! Learn from his mistakes, but celebrate the positives in his life and applaud him for being a risk taker and for paying his own way and not relying on his family or the government. This is one of the most important lessons the book offers. March to your own drummer and own your own drum.
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Summary: Into the whining
Review: Anyone who likes this book has not read it. Krakauer spends more time whining about his troubled relationship with his own father, and complaining that Jack London was an overweight city slicker, than he does addressing the story of a young man who was extremely interesting. If you have seen the episode of Millenium about this, or saw it on 48 Hours, you will have gained more insight than Krakauer's incessant whining. To put it into perspective, when I saw the book, my wife (who had read the book) said I would be very disappointed. I was more than disappointed. The book is a complete waste of time to anyone but Krakauer's overtaxed therapist.
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Summary: A challenge to truly live life
Review: Into the Wild is ostensibly about Christopher McCandless, a young man who set off alone on a transcontinental trek in 1992 and whose decomposing body was found in the Alaskan wilderness four months later. But Krakauer's book is less an account of how McCandless died than an intimate exploration of how he sought to live. Through Krakauer's post-mortem investigation and interviews with McCandless's family, friends, and acquaintances he encountered in his journey, we come to know a man who was intelligent, passionate, and utterly dissatisfied with the trappings of 20th Century America. McCandless cast off his successes and material burdens to seek out a more primal affirmation of what it means to be alive, to be a creature of the Earth and of the earth. Echoes of Thoreau are inevitable and are peppered throughout Krakauer's account, but he refrains from lapses into romanticism and does not shy from pointing out McCandless's ignorance and errors of judgement. But neither does he suggest, as some did, that McCandless's seeming recklessness betrayed a death wish; rather we see a young man so entranced by the siren call of the pure and simple life that he approached the hazards that adorned his path with myopic disregard. Krakauer detours periodically from his narrative examination of McCandless's last days to tell of others, including the author himself, who like McCandless sought for even one brief moment to truly live, believing that one sweet memory would forever change their perspective on existence. In the end, Krakauer resists the temptation to provide a facile explanation for McCandless's actions. The reader can decide for him/herself whether McCandless was a bold adventurer, a misguided boy, or a brash fool. Whatever the ultimate opinion, one is left with, if not respect, at least a measure of understanding and possibly envy at McCandless determination to seek out and truly live life--convention, convenience, and rationality be damned.
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