Les Jones

A&E > "Into the Wild" Comes to the Big Screen

I just found out via "Ebert and Roper" via Melissa that there's a big-screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which is my favorite book of his. It's the story of Chris McCandless, a simultaneously starry-eyed yet jaundiced kid who graduated Emory university, gave the money his grandparents gave him for law school to Oxfam, set out across America on an adventure, abandoned his car in a gulch, hitchhiked to Alaska to fulfill his dream of living in the wilderness, and eventually died in a schoolbus out in the wild.

Krakauer's non-fiction is amazing, not only for the adventures, but for better understanding the motivations of the people who eschew ordinary existence to risk their lives for non-material ends. Not having seen the movie, I can't recommend it, but I can highly recommend the book, which won a National Book Award. Krakauer's Into Thin Air about the 1996 deaths on Mount Everest is even more exciting, but because Krakauer was a participant in the events the book is substantially less objective.