Into the Wild in Around the Year in 52 Books

Apr 05, 2010 Ciara rated it it was ok

Shelves: autobio-memoir, read-in-2010

this isn't actually an autobiography. it's a biography (more or less). i need to make some new "shelves," but i dread re-categorizing all the books i have already added to goodreads. maybe i'll get around to it someday.

i have almost no opinion about this book. it's fairly brief, only about 150 pages, & it follows the journey of a kid named christopher mccandless (hobo alias: alexander supertramp, which is the perfect obnoxious bullshit name for a self-styled hobo). chris grew up in a fairly well this isn't actually an autobiography. it's a biography (more or less). i need to make some new "shelves," but i dread re-categorizing all the books i have already added to goodreads. maybe i'll get around to it someday.

i have almost no opinion about this book. it's fairly brief, only about 150 pages, & it follows the journey of a kid named christopher mccandless (hobo alias: alexander supertramp, which is the perfect obnoxious bullshit name for a self-styled hobo). chris grew up in a fairly well-off family & seemed to have everything going for him. he went to emory for college & was close with his younger sister. his parents wanted to do things like give him a car for his high school graduation, but he had a beater he already loved so he said no. what his family didn't appear to realize until it was too late was that chris was indeed a festering mass of resentment & teen angst wrapped up in an incendiary & selfish little package. he had unearthed some info about how his dad had impregnanted his mom with him before he was all the way split up with his previous wife, & chris couldn't handle the perceived "hypocrisy" of his father. so one summer, he packed up his beater car & disappeared "into the wild".

he drove across the country & managed to flood his car in a desert riverbed. smooth move, ex-lax. he thought the car was a goner, so he covered it with a tarp & some natural camouflage & decided that the best move from here on out would be to burn all the cash he had with him & set off on foot/riding the rails/etc. all this bugged, just because it's the same fucking bullshit i hear from every dumbass spoiled punk kid who has ever read walden & decided that modern society is a deadening rat race of hypocrisy & oppression, blah blah blahcakes. hey kids? get over yourselves.

so. chris travels around a bit. he keeps a little log of his adventures. he rides trains. he buys a canoe & tries to paddle from the interior of mexico's swampy river system to the pacific ocean. he ends up in the dakotas doing some farm work. he does not communicate with his family at all. they go so far as to hire a private detective to try to find him. the detective is not successful. eventually chris decides that it would be totally awesome to spend the summer living off the land in the alaskan wilds. much is made of his last communiques with the various people he got to know on the road: some itinerant travelers in northern california who helped outfit him with wilderness gear, an old man in the desert who was deeply inspired by chris's live free example, the dude in the daoktas who hooked him up with farm work, the guy who gave him his final ride up in alaska.

so chris hitches up to a point where he feels he can just walk off into the woods, & so he does. he has to cross a small river or two to really "disappear off the map" (in his own imagination, because this is 1992 & there's pretty much no unmapped territory anymore, besides maybe the island on "lost" & even that seems pretty thoroughly colonized by plane crash survivors & weirdo scientists). he finds an old abandoned bus & sets up camp. at first he, he tries to get away from the bus & go into the wilderness more, but that doesn't really pan out, so he pretty much just lives in the bus, tries his hand at hunting, & gathers sustenance. things go pretty well. no one else stumbles across his little campsite all summer. he's not eating like a king, but he's surviving. but then he starts to feel sick. & when he tries to re-trace his steps to get back to civilization, he finds the rivers he crossed in early summer are now swollen with snow melt off the mountains & he can't get across. he goes back to the bus & tries to wait it out, but he gets sicker & sicker. & then he dies.

a couple of weeks later, some campers & hunters came across chris's body & his possessions (including scraps of journals he kept during his travels, photographs, the skeletons of animals he killed for food, etc). jon krakauer wrote the episode up for "outside" magazine & then expanded it for this book. his research indicates that generally chris had a pretty clear idea of what he was doing, but erred in storing some edible seeds in a plastic bag. the seeds grew a toxic mold which poisoned him. because he was eating only a sustenance-level diet & didn't have the necessary fat stores to clear the poison, he died. kind of a fluke, in other words. & his van wasn't even as isolated as he thought. cabins stocked with food & survival supplies surrounded him & he (supposedly) never found them. there was even a way for him to cross the river two miles away from where he'd tried to cross when he got sick, but because he didn't have up-to-date maps, he hadn't known.

krakauer seems to not want us to judge this kid or think he's a dumbass for dying in such a fucked up, avoidable way, but it's kind of tough not to feel a little bit of contempt for someone who basically romanticized himself to death. the part that really freaks me out is that this book is cross-shelved in the young adult section at my local library & is generally checked out about 80% of the time. i'm sure it's a popular read among disaffected teens who feel that their families & society at large are hypocritical & stifling, & they fantasize about wandering off into the wilderness & leading a free & independent life of adventure & going where their hearts take them. & krakauer's book does very little to dissuade them or inject some harsh reality into the proceedings (not that most teens or young adults are all that amenable to harsh reality in the first place). i have just known too many people like chris mccandless to really be impressed with his "zest for life" or "unique spirit" or whatever. he thought he was a special little snowflake, big whoop. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Apr 06, 2014 Nancy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, america, adventure, still-owned

I'm not sure what I expected with this book, but it wasn't what I got. I hadn't realised that it was the story of a young man who had disappeared to wander around the US, ultimately meeting a tragic ending in the wilds of Alaska. The story was by turns sad, frustrating and strange and although the book was readable, there were times I felt that it had been stretched to actually fill a book. I know the initial story had been told in a 9000 word article and actually, by the time I had got to the e ...more

Like · see review