Mar 16, 2008

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild sat on my bookshelf at home. I bought it for my husband as congratulations for completing a lecture at a physics conference in Oahu this fall. Since it was already there, I thought I might as well read it for this review. I am sure most people are familiar with the story at some level, from reading the book or the fairly recent major motion picture based on it, but a brief synopsis: Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate from a well-to-do family, adopts the name Alexander Supertramp, dissatisfied with capitalist culture, set off on his “ultimate adventure” to live off the land in Alaska. He donates the remainder of his college fund ($24,000) to OXFAM, and heads west, leaving no way to contact or track him. His adventure ends in slow starvation after a few years of wandering and the final sixteen weeks sustaining himself in Alaska, where he ate the seeds of a plant that grew a toxic mold because of especially rainy weather. He drew much attention and criticism after his death for the pain he caused his family, for his apparent disrespect for the Alaskan wilderness, and the avoidability of his pointless death, if he had only carried a map, he’d have known that he was not far from help.

Throughout the narration of the story, I wavered from respecting, appreciating, and connecting to criticizing, judging, and questioning Chris’s motives and authenticity. It is difficult to objectively evaluate his story torn between disapproval of his rejection of family, his overconfidence, and outspoken judgment of the way others choose to live, and complete admiration of his commitment, and his eventual discovery of the importance of community (inferred from his markings in the margins of Doctor Zhivago, the last book he read).

This story reminds me of Better Off another book about a young man, Eric Brende, discontented with contemporary life, who for his MIT thesis, decides to live for eighteen months with an Amish-like community to determine how much technology is too much. I suppose I am somewhat drawn to these characters in search of balance, to stopping to question the direction that society is moving, and examine whether or not this is where we want to go. Eric, learns to appreciate the community that he finds through work, hard physical labor, and learns to accept the “interruptions” of a neighbor needing a hand and the exchange of assistance. Eric takes the values that he learns from living within this community and extends them into his everyday life after the experience, choosing to live where he will not need a vehicle driving a rickshaw in St. Louis. While the two men are after somewhat different alternatives, they have the same motivation. I am slightly more sensitive to this attempt because it is centered around community as opposed to Chris’s disconnected individual pursuit. Eric looks for ways to exist within society, and change it, not sustain himself outside of it. (As I just had to look up his name “Eric Brende” as the author of Better Off, I noticed that Jon Krakauer gives a brief praising review across the cover.)

Maybe a good segway in to the posting below...

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