Into the Wild is a unique book. It blends the style of an autobiography of a young man traveling to seek peace in the woods as an act of defiance to the law and to everyone that says he can’t, compared to a mystery novel that tries to assess which method of death in which this daring individual encountered in the untamed wild of Mt. McKinley. The story begins when a you man named Christopher “Alex” Johnson McCandless is hitch hiking at the side of a highway and it escalates into a rich story that doesn’t stop getting more and more intriguing until you’ve finished the book and started to do some detective work on the subject yourself.
The author makes a huge commitment to finding out who this guy is and how he felt about the world around him which makes it a more enjoyable story rather than a more factual autobiography that states what happened in his life. He connected the story to a time when he too wanted to do something reckless despite all outside input. He sets going to every place and talking to every person that Chris was or knew as a high priority in retelling his story. This story is not about his opinion on how he thought about it, it’s about how his close friends reacted to his death and how his family thought of him in aftermath.
This is, in short a work of masterpiece built by hard work and crafted with knowledge and expertise. A lot of work was put into this novel and it shows that a writer with such a vivid background has the strength to relive the horrors that this man faced in the wild in the form of a piece of literature and sharing this horror with the rest of the world. Showing the lifesaving decisions that were not made that could have saved him from the vicious cold of the Alaskan tundra and all of its hazards.
This book occupied me with thrill and danger for the week that it took me to read this great book. I would recommend it to any hiker, backpacker, mountaineer, camper, or hunter that wants to get a little heads up on what happens when you are not prepared to go into the wild. I would also recommend this book to anyone who wants a good read that will chill you and strike fear into the heart of anyone with a yearning to travel into the wild.