Into the Wild – Review

So yes I am back to blogging after what was like 3 months?! I am trying to get back to reading books and watching movies. And soon will start blogging regularly and hope to read blogs soon too..

Oh and my blog completed 6 years! 😀

I recently read this book “Into the Wild”  and then watched the movie by the same name and was totally blown away by it. It was a great book and a great movie – a nonfiction but more interesting than many fiction I have read.

Genre: Non-fiction, Travel, Adventure
Author: Jon Krakauer

“I now walk into the wild”

Short synopsis (taken from the “Author’s note” in the book):

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters…

So you get a gist of what the book is about.

The book was written very well. A very engaging book about a young man who is adventurous and to an extent stupid too. When the book started, I did not feel pity for the man. I thought he was really foolish to have walked into the wilderness without being prepared for it. But at the end the author had me convinced that he was no fool, but in fact very well capable of having survived in the wild. It was his ill fate that took his life.

On his journey to Alaska, he makes friendship with a woman named Jan, a girl Tracy who liked him, an old man named Ron Franz and another man named Wayne. These stories of friendship and their accounts of how sweet the boy was make the book more interesting. One thing I admired a lot about the man was his courage and passion to follow his dreams, which not many of us have. I would love to go backpacking like him but I know that I will not survive for a single day in the wild like that. Imagine he living all alone for 119 days!!

But what he did to his parents and sister was very sad. That chapter almost had me in tears. No matter how angry you are with them, there is no point in punishing your family by breaking contact like that. I wish he had not done that. I also liked how Krakauer compared himself with Chris. The author’s own journey on which he set forth alone was equally adventurous. The other section of the book I liked a lot was about other adventurers who met similar fate as Chris did.

My favourite quote from the book: “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED”. This is something that Chris realized pretty late in his life.

I am still kind of confused and not sure what I feel about Chris and his journey to Alaska: should I think he was an arrogant, foolish man? or should I think he was a brave, adventurous man? But one thing is for sure, I appreciate him for his love for nature and adventure.
Overall a great read and I feel every person must read it once. It was an eye-opener for me.

I watched the movie after reading the book. You can appreciate a movie better, if you have read the book first -it is always the case with me.

Movie released in: 2007
Director: Sean Penn
It is one of the top 250 movies in IMDB list.

It was amazing! I literally had tears in my eyes. It was shot beautifully and the story is so tragic that you cannot help but cry. Definitely one of my all-time favourite movies. In the movie, they have mixed scenes from his adventure in Alaska and his journey to Alaska very well. The narration in the movie was done by his sister Carine. Alaska looks so great with its scenic beauty and wilderness that I feel like visiting it sometime.

Christopher McCandless: Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. – Alexander Supertramp May 1992 

Now off to read “Into thin air” by the same author. I love the way he writes.