(4 maps) (First printing of 35,000 author tour)
Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.Ī wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice).
He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life'' "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something-the Alaskan wild-that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. Four years later, Strayed is 26 years old, divorced, a veteran of innumerable meaningless sexual encounters, plenty of bad waitressing jobs, and a fortunately short-lived heroin addiction.The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).Ĭhris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. Her two siblings drift away, and her young marriage fails as well, in a kind of hideous slow motion punctuated with affairs and constant moving. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, her much-loved stepfather distances himself and remarries quickly. Her biological father was abusive, and it was years before her mother finally managed to leave him.
Her childhood was scrappy and impoverished, including a long stint in a house in the Minnesota north woods without electricity or running water. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm.” Her book is crammed with moments like this-passages of vicious discomfort with herself, her family, and her physical surroundings that are almost painful to read. “I howled and howled and howled,” she writes, “rooting my face into her body like an animal. Despite a bedside vigil, Strayed just misses her mother’s death.
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