He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer