Book Review: Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer

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I thought I was just going to read about some guy who went off into the wilderness and didn’t make it back. I mean, we already know the ending before we even start — Christopher McCandless dies. But the thing is, the book isn’t really about his death. It’s about the restless ache in people like him. The kind of ache you feel when you’re lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, and thinking, There’s got to be more than this.

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Jon Krakauer doesn’t just throw the story at you; he threads it through journal entries, letters, interviews, and his own reflections. It’s part biography, part investigation, part personal confession. I think what really got me was how intimate it felt — like Krakauer wasn’t just telling Chris’s story, he was holding it in his hands like something fragile. And in a way, he was.

Chris was an idealist to the extent that he was reckless. He gave his money away, left his car, burned the last of his cash and disappeared into life on the road. Other folks read that and get eye rolls -” What an idiot.” I did not, however. Not completely. His obstinacy is something maddening and beautiful. It was not just that he was running away, he was running to a purity that he believed the world had lost.

And yet… There is no reading this book without experiencing that foreboding dread. It is in the small details, how he misjudged the Alaskan wilderness, how loneliness was beginning to curl over and around him. You get to a place where you can see the thing that he was in pursuit of was the same that would bring him down. That hurt, because it got me thinking about how we all have these dreams that we romanticize, and how reality is a little more jagged than we would like to pretend it is.

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Among the scenes that stuck with me was the time when Krakauer compares the life of Chris with his youthful exploits. You sense the low confession I might have been to him. And perhaps that is why the book will not go away, because it is not only Chris in the book. It is about us all who have imagined walking away out of the noise and discovering who we are when no one is watching.

I did not find tidy answers by the time I got to the end of it. I felt like a mess of admiration, frustration and sadness. Into the Wild does not come to explain to you that Chris was right or wrong. It’s there to leave you wondering: How much would you do to lead a life that you feel is yours completely?

And honestly, that’s why it stayed in my head long after the coffee went cold.

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The last three images was gotten from web:

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