Review of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

*Into the Wild* by Jon Krakauer (1996). Published by Anchor (2015).

Into the Wild is one of those books I’ve always skirted around reading. I knew the movie version of the book existed somewhere out in the world, but then I didn’t end up watching that.

However, I did know quite a bit about the case that this book is based on. When I was young, instead of going outside, I had a tendency to spend quite a bit of time diving into rabbit holes about random events and things that happened around the world. That was how I first came to know about the book.

Last year, upon writing this, I spent a six month internship at the Smithsonian, where I began to spend my time listening to audiobooks while I worked. That said, this habit stuck around when I finished my internship, and now, as I’m writing my master’s thesis, I’ve been listening to audiobooks.

And that’s how I ended up listening to Into the Wild! I needed something available immediately through my library’s Libby and it was, so I just decided to shrug my shoulders and listen to it. And I’m glad I did!

Here’s my review.

Journalistic details and recalling of the incident that led to a young Chris McCandless to die in the Alaskan wilderness.

We begin this book with tragedy: Chris McCandless, in 1992, was found dead inside of an abandoned bus on an Alaskan trail. Not too long prior, he had ventured his way across the country, not telling anyone really where he was going, including his parents. He worked odd jobs throughout the course of his journeys, and then eventually decided to cross the river on an Alaskan trail, but he would never cross it yet again.

What the author is doing in this text is recreating his journey until he died, using the context clues and details he compiled to give a bigger picture beyond the article titles that made their way out into the world. We learn more about his upbringing, education, and parents, who had no idea what was happening to their son.

McCandless kind of just sold everything, quit his life, and then went on a journey. At one point he even abandoned his car and burned the money he had, leading to the unfortunate circumstances that ended his life. We also learn that there were ways he probably could have survived, including if he had just tried to cross the river, despite its swelling and rapid growth with the onset of the cold season.

The synopsis of this book includes him vanishing into the wild, and reading what Krakaeur had to say, it makes it a little less mysterious as to why he chose what to do what he did.

To this day, Krakauer insists that McCandless died by eating a certain kind of fruit and seed, which had high amounts of poison in them. This was controversial when it first came out, but this is the book where Krakaeur starts asserting some opinions, and decades later, in 2015, he even coauthored a scientific piece discussing how this might’ve been the case and contribution to the young man’s demise.

I thought that this book was honestly pretty accessible for what it is. I tend to get a little worried when I read texts like this through an audiobook format, as the denseness might not be easy to understand when someone is listening to it. However, I thought that this was pretty clear, and it would have been fine listening or reading to it in general.

Overall Thoughts

This was such an interesting read! I found myself thinking about it in the days that I finished listening to the audiobook, which is a sign to me that it stuck within my brain. Sometimes I listen and read to books that I may never think of again, which is terrible to think about in the long run.

There are a lot of themes beyond how sad the story is: it’s about a young person going off on a journey to try and understand life, going out into the wilderness, and paying the price. You can say what you want about the case, but it resonates with me. I get why he made some of his decisions in the end.

Go read it if you haven’t already—this is a fascinating one.

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