Into the Wild
Years ago my sister told me about this small book that she had read called Into the Wild. She picked it up in a bookstore because the cover intrigued her. Turns out the book was about this guy who graduated from our high school in the year between us, 1986. I graduated in 85, she in 87. We both vaguely remembered this guy, but when we checked our yearbooks there were no pictures at all of him. He was this mysterious guy we sort of remembered at our largish school (my graduating class was 520 people).
The other small thing that got me to read it was that it was written by Jon Krakauer who also wrote Into Thin Air - the story of the disastrous Mt. Everest climb of 1996 where several people died. That is a riveting book.
Anyway, I highly recommend Into the Wild (book) - it is a well written account of Chris McCandless’ journey from northern Virginia to the wilds of Alaska - and I give it 5 stars out of 5 (from my memory of it, having read it about 10 years ago).
Now comes the movie version of the story, directed by Sean Penn and I’m very interested in seeing it. I disagree with his politics, but Penn is a good actor and director and I think he’s probably done justice to the story. Sadly, I’ll have to wait for the DVD, I think.