Jon Krakauer's Epic Adventure Tale: "Into the Wild"

Arth: Hat sich über die Lieferung gefreut

Germany on Nov 05, 2023

vN: zum Gebrauch für den Schulunterricht, was soll ich da noch schreiben...

Germany on Oct 06, 2023

Ashok Krishna: “Youth is wasted on the Young!”
- The great GB Shaw opined thus. ‘Into The Wild’ is the tale of a young man on whom youth was wasted. Wasted but not thrown away.

Christopher Walt McCandless was a young man that went into the Alaskan wild, leaving his parents and siblings behind, donating all his savings, abandoning his car, possessions and even burning whatever little money he had in his wallet, thus shaking away the shackles of financial security. He went away from the human civilization not because he was a glum recluse or a misanthropist. He was just one of those innumerable youngsters who feel that the answers to the testing questions of Life can be found only far away from Life and not by being in it on a day-to-day basis.

With evidently little preparation but abundant confidence that is the trademark of Youth, Chris headed into the Alaskan wilderness determined to make a living ‘off the land’, by hunting and eating whatever he could gather there, far away from the nearest human being. Little would he have known that this would be his last venture away from his family, because his lifeless body was found in emaciated state, four months after he...

India on Feb 07, 2017

Cathy: I listened to the audio version of this book and Philip Franklin does a great job with the narration. I haven’t read Jon Krakauer before and I enjoyed the author’s writing style and the gradual unfolding of Chris McCandless’ story. I’d never heard of Chris McCandless before this and I found the story fascinating, tragic and scarcely credible in parts. If this had been fiction I can imagine the reader or listener berating the ‘hero’ for his lack of foresight and preparation before embarking on such a dangerous and uncertain journey.

Jon Krakauer explores Chris’ McCandless’s life, and death, through his family, Chris’ own notes, photographs and letters, plus the people he met on his travels, most of whom felt a compelling pull towards the young man and came to love him.

Basically, I’m not sure what to think. Here’s a highly academically intelligent young man who had a privileged upbringing, protesting strongly against world hunger and the wastage of food. He was angry at his father who lead a double life for several years, which is understandable. Perhaps it was a combination of these things, coupled with the books he was fond of reading by...

United Kingdom on Jun 13, 2016

Indian Reader: This is the story of Christopher Mccandless: a prodigal kid born and brought up in an affluent family in US. Immediately after his graduation in 1990 he left his worldly belongings and his home without informing anyone including his family in 1990 to experience the world on his own, at a tender age of 22.By third week of August 1994 he was dead in Alaska. The book traces his journey though not in chronological order.

After reading a small article about the death of an unknown 'hitchhiker' in Alaska, the intrigued Jon Krakauer, himself a mountaineer, decided to explore further about the deceased. The book is a result of author's attempt to discover Christopher Mccandless. Beside his journeys, the book also covers his past that gives an insight into why he was the way we find him; his relation with parents, sister, friends, his outlook about the society and his non-conforming attitude towards tradition and status quo. In between chapters there are brief profiling of personalities ( adventurers ), who had similar experiences with life and might have influenced Chris like Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, John Franklin etc. Each chapter starts with quotes which are relevant to the prose...

India on Jul 13, 2015

Fine2opine: As of 05.03.2015, there are 2,249 reviews of "Into The Wild", with 489, or 22%, being negative, leaving 1,760 as positive. With so many reviews, another one either gushing with praise or heaping contempt would be at most a redundancy, and at worst a waste of my time as well as the reader of this review.

To fully appreciate this book as Krakauer wrote it (and as Christopher would have as well), the reader should ideally be pre-possessed with a sense of spirituality of some form, and an intellect that is open to perspectives other than their own. The mind that is closed to concepts unfamiliar to them, or so pragmatic in their life-view that deviations from common sense cannot be reconciled with the world beyond our five senses will be ill-suited to this recounting of an incredible journey of a soul; the awakening, the flowering of, and (where McCandless leaves 99.99% of us behind) the implementation of exploring the world through the eyes of a curious and life-loving ascetic.

This book is about the journey and evolution of a human soul. Christopher McCandless was a modern day John Muir, Jack London, George Mallory, Henry David Thoreau. Just as these men were...

United States on May 03, 2015

Fyrecurl: NARRATIVE ARC AND PARALLEL STRUCTURE– IN A NON-FICTION NOVEL
When Jon Krakaur wrote an account of the untimely death of a young man who went into the wilds of Alaska with little more than his wits, he was faced with the daunting task of how he would write the story. In this creative non-fiction story, Krakaur used craft techniques that he could use in keeping a reader interested, particularly where most readers would know the ending before the story even began. Krakaur had already reported about Christopher Johnson McCandless’ fateful quest in Outside magazine. McCandless obviously examined the structure of any story, exposition, rising action, crisis, climax and denouncement, or resolution, and began to form how best to tell McCandless’ tragic story. He borrows the narrative arc technique from fiction, and uses parallel structure, interspersing several small stories, each with a different protagonist and antagonist, but with a common theme running through each, that ties the resolution together.
Krakaur’s story has a quasi-linear plot, with characters and setting, rising action, with conflicts and complications, and finally a resolution, where the ultimate question...

United States on May 02, 2013