From the Bookshelf of Read Between the Wines…

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

Start date: November 1, 2015

Finish date: November 30, 2015

Discussion: Book Club Discussions

Why we're reading this: This book was nominated by Jason.
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What Members Thought

Dec 16, 2012 Jason rated it it was amazing

Shelves: wine-club, reviewed, thrill-me-chill-me-fulfill-me, for-kindle

This is a great book and I was totally enthralled. Krakauer’s writing is spectacular. It is such a personal story, made so not just by the author detailing his own experiences mountaineering, but also by incorporating McCandless’s family in the suffering and loss of their son. Yet somehow Krakauer keeps it all grounded, presenting a strategically balanced view of McCandless himself despite what I must imagine to be a profound desire either to glorify him in his admirable quest for self-reliance, This is a great book and I was totally enthralled. Krakauer’s writing is spectacular. It is such a personal story, made so not just by the author detailing his own experiences mountaineering, but also by incorporating McCandless’s family in the suffering and loss of their son. Yet somehow Krakauer keeps it all grounded, presenting a strategically balanced view of McCandless himself despite what I must imagine to be a profound desire either to glorify him in his admirable quest for self-reliance, or to vilify him for the reckless audacity he demonstrated along the way. Or perhaps both.

Because that’s the thing about McCandless’s story. It isn’t so much that it’s difficult not to form an opinion of him one way or the other; it’s that any opinion formed is bound to be fluid, rapidly shifting from veneration to condemnation and back again. It’s fair to say McCandless was an estimable guy, not just talking in rhetoric about the societal evils of homelessness and hunger but actually going out and attempting to do something about it. It’s also fair to say he was kind of an asshole, treating his parents with relentless cruelty on account of some unrealistic moral standards he for some reason held them to. But he wasn’t an asshole for going to Alaska, seemingly unpreparedly, and succumbing to what he should have known better to avoid. For that he was only a kid, a kid who took big risks (as kids are wont to do), but ultimately a kid who just got unlucky.

One thing I kept thinking about while reading this book is the idea of self-reliance. Because it isn't really an absolute, right? There are degrees to which one can be self-reliant. I mean, even Thoreau went into town periodically to buy tools or to barter for whatever. Does that invalidate his approach? Did McCandless take the concept to an extreme by forsaking a map because maps are drawn by other human beings? (The answer to that is YES.) But by the same token, what is wrong with categorizing our own lives as “self-reliant” if we are able to perform all of our daily tasks without the assistance of others? I don’t really endorse this argument, by the way. I’m only saying that I think there is value in striving toward a state of self-reliance, but I simultaneously hold that survivability will certainly drop to zero the closer one actually comes to completely attaining it. ...more

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May 28, 2013 Becky rated it liked it

Shelves: brrr-its-cold-in-here, frontiers, man-versus-nature, meh, memoir-ee, 2015-2016-adventure-read, hubris, wanderlust-for-nature, physical-library-read, shouldve-read-young

Is there anything new to be said about Chris “Alex Supertramp” McCandless? I fall decidedly into the disapproving camp I suppose, but not without empathy, and not without sympathy. I understand wanderlust, I understand the need to flee to the woods and reduce oneself to a primal existence, to be fed up with structures and crave an open, organic environment. I even understand and have witnessed, though have never experienced personally, that seemingly normal immortality delusion that males ages 1 Is there anything new to be said about Chris “Alex Supertramp” McCandless? I fall decidedly into the disapproving camp I suppose, but not without empathy, and not without sympathy. I understand wanderlust, I understand the need to flee to the woods and reduce oneself to a primal existence, to be fed up with structures and crave an open, organic environment. I even understand and have witnessed, though have never experienced personally, that seemingly normal immortality delusion that males ages 15-24 seem to go through- it’s almost like a biological imperative that they do not contemplate that death can happen despite their own resolve and will. I have even come to understand his rigidly imposed distance from his parents- as Carine, his sister, has now written a book explaining that life was MUCH more abusive at home than Into The Wild let on, and that Krakauer, as a good journalist and writer, withheld what she asked him not to share. What I cannot tolerate, however, was his abandonment of his sister (who, was now left alone in that same abusive environment), friends that he made, and his god-awful proletariat preaching or his third-person diary (are you that vain, or that disassociated?). No, I’ve met McCandless’ in my life, and we don’t get on in general, and that’s fine, because both they and I are the type of people that don’t give a fuck about the others opinion, so we can go right on our own way. I also cannot tolerate people who go off into the wild completely unprepared, and expect to be rescued- like people that surf in hurricanes. You should not get to risk other people’s lives, rescuer’s lives, because of your hubris. McCandless has me there, he did not expect to be saved, so that’s actually a point FOR him in my book, but it doesn’t make up for the points against him- no topographical map, axe, or compass, a chickenshit gun, no radio, or plan for someone, anyone, to check on him if he weren’t back in the allotted time. So, sure, you wanted to go out and have a purely wild experience, fine, don’t get the fucking map and the radio out until you need it. Its just kind of despicable to me- to put siblings through that sort of loss, to impose your corpse on others to find it and clean up the mess, simply put I find that egotistical and rude. Oh, and if you want to wail over the wasted life of the moose that you shot, oh pity! The meat spoilt and you have wasted a life in your unconscious attempt for food, holy food… then pity the pain and misery that you caused extra by not having the appropriate weapon or caliber of bullet. McCandless hated man exerting his superficial control over nature, but in the end, he was no different, he wanted to experience his own level of control over nature, that by living in and with it he had somehow harnessed its primal power, but that is just not how it works. He went in with typical twentieth century hubris and just tried to color it as something else. This isn’t to say that he didn’t love nature, or experience its profundity, just that ultimately it was likely that it would turn on him, because while he loved it, he was not granting it the respect that it deserved as its own master. To top that off, in his desire for adventure and mastery, and given his exploits covered in the book previous to Alaska, he would never have settled down, he would have pushed his limits until inevitably, like untold explorers and mountaineers before him, he bit off more than he can chew. He is absolutely not unique in that. Nor is he unique in his arrogance and wanderlust- to be entirely fair think of all those sociopathic men that dragged their families down the Oregon Trail knowing NOTHING of the hardship in front of them. Nebraska probably wouldn’t be here if there hadn’t been propagandists completely willing to capitalize on his personality traits. There is nothing particularly unique about any part of his story, except that Krakauer is an amazing author, and he chose to tell this tale.

And all of that was a review of McCandless, and not really the work at hand. I cannot understand Krakauer’s apologist stance on McCandless. To say that McCandless died of toxicity, and not starvation, is really a chicken-and-the-egg argument. McCandless was already starving, if he had not been he would not have been reduced to eating mass quantities of moldy seeds, he would have also had the requisite energy and fat to purge the poison and slowly regain health, so to say that he did not die of starvation seems incorrect to me. Toxicity was simply a compounding problem. To also say that he made it 100 days in the wilderness, and so he must have been somewhat competent, also seems disingenuous as he didn’t seem to want to make it those 100 days, he tried to leave but realized too late that he couldn’t because he was not prepared for the change in Alaskan rivers in the summer, and at this point again, he was likely already beginning to starve. More prepared than some, but not prepared or knowledgeable enough. I will agree with Krakauer in the sense that going into backcountry and up mountains and kayaking down violent rivers is just playing Russian roulette. To some extent you can increase the capacity of the gun's cylinder, making it less and less likely that the bullet is going to go off on you, but that single bullet is still in there. Sometimes you just get hit by lightning. So sure, McCandless got unlucky with the seeds and a mold that wasn’t "discovered" for twenty years after his death, but, by not bringing emergency rations, map, or a radio, he significantly reduced the cylinder capacity, making it more and more likely that the bullet was going to go off, and, it did.

Despite Krakauer’s apologist stance, the book was a quick, easy, and still intriguing read. There was a lot of disgusted snorting and eye-rolling on my part, but I also couldn’t put the book down. I enjoyed the side stories of John Muir and other adventurer’s more that McCandless himself, but he still made an interesting case study. Still, I didn’t feel that Krakauer delivered on the back-jacket promises of studying what drives men into the wild, and some of his tie-ins from other adventurers seemed like unexplored name drops. It’s a rainy day book that you could almost read in one sitting, and it’s a solid 3.5 stars. And, if I am being honest, I have to admit that my annoyance with McCandless is forcing me to round down to 3, rather than up to 4, because ultimately- I didn’t really care for the subject matter.
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