Amazon.com Review "God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandlesstrade a bright future--a college education, material comfort,uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandonedbus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that JonKrakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn't—cannot—answer thequestion with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable lightalong the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," butalso the forces that drive people to drop out of society and testthemselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writingon a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through theromantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juicesof boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild showsthat McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makesthe hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could neverpull off. By
¥58.90
