A review by jentang
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

5.0

Although I couldn't be any further removed from the scene of young men grappling with their nearly-impossible-to-wrangle angst in the Wild West or on mountain ranges, I was vehemently sucked into this account of McCandless's life. Krakauer's writing was compelling and relatively complete, a commendable feat given the surely limited amount of information on McCandless's journeys he had to work with. It's true that he did not keep the story completely centered around McCandless, but I can understand his need for filler material, even if it did come from sources like his personal experiences.  I was actually appreciative of the positive bias with which he wrote, as I think a life as adventurous as McCandless's should be celebrated rather than criticized. While it's easy to attribute McCandless's downfall to haughtiness, stupidity, ignorance, privilege, selfishness, etc., it feels unnecessarily cruel to do so. In fact, it's hard to do anything but admire him here. He did not squander the life he lived in the least. Throughout his 24 years, he stayed remarkably true to his inner morals and desires as he embarked upon venture after venture leading him to see more sights than some of his living critics ever will. Many bash him for being underprepared for the wilderness he threw himself into, but for what it's worth, he had triumphed time and time again against Mother Nature thanks to a combination of certainly luck as well as his own resourcefulness. With all this being said, I already knew how the story would end, and yet it was still genuinely upsetting to read, especially as I grasped just how close McCandless was to having made it out of this spectacular journey that had called to him for so long with not just experience under his belt and dirt under his fingernails, but also a new sense of direction and contentment in life. Though McCandless used to run from his troubles, first for sport in high school and later on as a way of life, towards the end, I felt he was no longer trying to escape, but rather wholly move forward. The world out there is incomprehensibly vast, and while the rules and limitations of the society inhabiting it were not greatly suited to McCandless / Alexander Supertramp, I'm glad he got to see as much of it as he did.