2021/082: Into the Wild -- Jon Krakauer

...if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. [p. 198]

In August 1992 24-year-old Chris McCandless, who'd donated his savings account to Oxfam and taken off into the wilds of Alaska, died in the wreckage of a disused bus. Into the Wild is an examination of his story, and the stories of other young men -- often inspired by writers such as Jack London -- who've been driven to escape modern life and retreat into an idealised wild state. There's mention, too, of the Franklin expedition, similarly ill-prepared for survival in the frozen north.

Author Jon Krakauer, who'd previously written a long article on McCandless for a magazine, retraced the young man's last year of travel (hitchhiking from California to Alaska: vividly recalled by those who helped him) and tried to make sense of his death. Krakauer writes of how he empathised with McCandless because he too had had a difficult relationship with his family, a yearning for wilderness, and a hubristic expedition into the Alaskan wilderness that was nearly fatal. In his original article he was somewhat disparaging about McCandless' survival skills: over the course of this exploration, he discovered that McCandless had not been as hapless as he'd previously thought.

There's a lot of splendid description of the wilderness here, and Krakauer writes with compassion for McCandless' family and friends. Much of the account, though, is based on extrapolation of McCandless' laconic journal entries, and inevitably there's some invention. (See here for a rigorous critique.) But I found this very readable, often poignant, and informed by the author's sympathy and affection for his subject. McCandless seems to have died because of bad luck as much as arrogance, and though in some respects his abandonment of friends and family was selfish, I can't help admiring his desire to extract himself from civilisation.

I bought this in 2017, because the story fascinates me: read it now, in 2021, because I'm on a 'reading diet' of non-fiction.