"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future -
a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm - for death by starvation
in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book
tries to answer. While it doesn't.cannot.answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild
does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey,"
but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other
ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared
in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through
the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him
has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly
unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never
pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic,
oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot,"
you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.

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