Krakauer reveals how he too was once the rebellious son of a loving but overbearing father and So one hates to give any of the mystery away.Д«ut certainly among the most moving chapters in the book are the two in which the author discloses why he identified with his subject so strongly. The last one falls into place in the final pages.

McCandless's life and death is that of artfully withholding the pieces of his puzzle until Krakauer displays in his reconstruction of Mr. What is it that finally pushes you off the fence? On which side of it do you fall? Yet another skill that Mr. The wilderness that often articulate acutely what Mr. He introduces each of his 18 chapters and his epilogue with quotations from the literature of McCandless's many forerunners who were driven to climb mountains too high, plumb wastelands too deep or brave elements too unforgiving. McCandless during his flight how particularly intelligent, unusual and just plain likable this young man was. He reveals through the eyes of many who met Mr. While conceding his subject's many flaws, he keeps hinting that something was special about thisД¬ase. Krakauer too readily exposes his subject's shortcomings, he also does a masterly job of keeping the reader's condemnation at bay. Of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill - just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed.ДЄs one angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: ''While I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. In short, at least at the beginning of ''Into the Wild,'' you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Mr. Not even offer speculation about some heroic psychic drama his subject might have been unconsciously acting out. McCandless's refusal to tell his devoted family his whereabouts after he graduated with honors from Emory University in 1990 and set off on his cockeyed hegira. More, the idealism that prompted this fatal romantic adventure appears both flawed and badly articulated, amounting as it does to phrases like ''plastic people'' and the need to ''revolutionize your lifeДЄnd move into an entirely new realm of experience,'' and cliched affirmations that writers like Tolstoy, Thoreau and Jack London were leading him on. McCandless's story unfolds in these pages, he seems to have been lacking in both adequate supplies and proper know-how when he waved goodbye to a trucker who had given him a lift and tramped off into the bush on April 28, 1992. Readers may at first have some trouble sympathizing with Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young man whose mysterious death in the Alaska wilderness Jon Krakauer explores so movingly in his new book, '' Into the Wild.''ДЄs Mr. (Jan.The New York Times: Book Review Search Article In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving.

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness.

Into the wild book