Title of the Book: Into the Wild
Author: Jon Krakauer
Number of Pages: 215
Rating: ☆☆☆

Review:
Hitch-hiking from the West to the North seems almost unbearable for many people, but not for Chris McCandless. His final two years was spent doing exactly this, and he met many people whom he left an impact on after his Northern Alaskan Odyssey proved fatal. From hopping trains, to hitch-hiking, with little-to-no money, Chris was able to travel from state to state, living off the land whilst preparing for his big Alaskan adventure.
In the Spring of 1990, Chris McCandless graduated from Emory college, with the intention of leaving his education, family, and the few friends he had behind to walk into the wild. Before he left, he gave away the rest of his savings to charity. After, Chris took his yellow Datsun to Lake Mead, where he abandoned his car, a guitar and 25 pounds of rice, taking ten pounds with him, and burned the rest of his money and his ID. From Lake Mead, Chris began the long journey ahead. Chris's second destination was California, where he bought a canoe to travel down the Colorado River and the Mexican Channels. At this time, Chris took on a new alias: Alex Supertramp. As he made it upriver, he went to a town called Carthage, South Dakota. There he worked and made many friends. When he left his job to travel the west more, he decided he wanted to go on the ultimate voyage, what he called his Alaskan Odyssey. Two years later, in 1992, Chris's decomposed and starved body was discovered in the notorious abandoned Fairbanks Bus 142 by hunters.
What makes Into the Wild different from other books is, Jon Krakauer approaches Chris McCandless's death not just as an author, but as a fellow mountaineer as well. Krakauer subtly interrupts the enigmatic story of Chris McCandless with some of his own narrative so more people could better understand who Chris McCandless was, and why his story is so unique. Krakauer uses his talents of investigative journalism and his mountaineering experiences to tell Chris's story. During the beginning of each chapter, he wrote out many of the quotes that Chris had underlined in his books. Some of the best moments in the story were, when Chris burned his own money, and when he convinced one of his friend's he met on the road, Ronald Franz, to create a "radical change in his lifestyle" (Krakauer 56), and to learn how to be in nature.
This book is for readers who take an interest in mountaineering and learning about the unforgiving habitat that many hikers enter, including Chris McCandless. Krakauer included lots of important detail of the wildnerness that contributed to Chris's death. This book is very humbling in knowing that there are terrains of the world that are more powerful than any human could ever be, and there are many places that have been yet to be discovered.