Review: Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer

One week ago, I read Jon Krakauer's horrifying account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, Into Thin Air.  At the time, I was stunned and eerily fascinated by the allure that these people found in climbing a mountain that proves fatal for one out of every 10 climbers.  Why would someone willingly endure something that, in the end, has a 10% chance of being fatal (even moreso if the individual is inexperienced and unprepared)?  

Four years before he climbed Mt. Everest, Krakauer became obsessed (as he puts it) with the story of Chris McCandless, a graduate of Emory College who left home abruptly after graduation, abandoned his car, burned all of his cash, and set out, as he put it "into the wild".  Two years later, his body was found, emaciated and frozen, in an abandoned bus along the Stampede Trail in Alaska.

In Into The Wild (title taken from one of McCandless' journal entries), Jon Krakauer acts, once again, as historian and forensic psychologist.  He follows McCandless' trail from Atlanta, GA, to the Yukon wilderness, tracking down and interviewing the people whom the boy met along the way.  The story is as tragic as it is fascinating.  Why would a twenty-four year old boy with his entire life ahead of him choose to give everything up to die in the wilderness?  Though it seems ridiculous to me (and probably to many), in his research, Krakauer shows that not only is this theology of life common, it's almost predictable in certain people -- including himself.

I didn't find myself as drawn to Into The Wild as I was with Into Thin Air, and I think this is mainly a formatting issue.  In Air, Krakauer went through the events surrounding the Everest disaster chronologically, whereas in Wild, he interspaces Chris' fatal travel to the Yukon territory with anecdotes from his friends and family, stories about other doomed hikers who battled the elements and lost, and a tale from Krakauer's own youth, when he himself attempted to go "into the wild."

At first I found it difficult to feel sorry for Chris, in the same way I did with the doomed Mt. Everest hikers in Air.  It was his own fault, I thought to myself.  He should have known better, should have been more careful -- maybe then he would still be alive today.  But by the end of the book, Krakauer had made me feel that I understood McCandless more, and to feel sorrow, not for his loss of life, but that the life he lost was cut off so young, before an old man can realize a young man's mistakes, before age brings wisdom and a little clarity to us all.

Rating: ****