The headlong rush

From a literary point of view, this book does not mark the player. It is located in the area of ​​investigation and testimony. Jon Krakauer, a journalist and mountaineer, accustomed to far north, left on the track of the young man found dead in an abandoned bus along the Stampede path in the heart of Alaska. What he describes is pretty amazing but not surprising.

No wonder as any young man can identify with "Alexander" Chris McCandless: a furious desire to live outside the norms, rejection of bourgeois values ​​embodied by his parents, strained family relationships, especially with an omnipresent father, an exhilarating reading text buff (Tolstoy, Thoreau, Shepard, london, ...), a desire to "liberate the Beast", the desire to prove something ... Everything is there to give in to the famous " temptation of Venice ", the one that we balance all over head. The young man showed both great certainty but also great candor, and a lot of will to follow through.

For only market in the mountains or in desert places, facing the splendid scenery, one can not but agree with Chris that captures the excitement, the feeling that grips us when we possess the world soul, the spirit elements and beasts, when you feel a part of the Wilderness, "the wild". And this feeling was even more exacerbated in the American imagination, "the wild" joined the Western legend, the conquest of "terra incognita", the spirit of pioneering adventure that is experienced in reading books Thoreau, Twain of Hoaghland.

But it's amazing anyway because McCandless shows a total lack of humility before the wilderness. It has a fairly developed sense of power and realizes through his diary left Alaska it all starts to overtake, it is time to return to men and to society. Outside, at the time when it finds it, it is too late, the forest does not release it, it demands its toll. Amazing because in this desolate region still closely mapped by satellites, he left without a map and believes be isolated while it is on a track, not far from a highway, surrounded by hunting huts, heart with a notch of a national park. And he died of malnutrition. One does not become a man of the woods. Living in trapper requires a long apprenticeship in the field, and not a solitary hike three months decided after reading "Build a fire." The ignorance of this reality principle will have been fatal to the young man.

Jon Krakauer takes a sober and journalistic style. To flesh out his story, he puts out a few other young people who wanted portraits of the break with all fasteners, including his own (Thumbs ascent of Devils). Some, like him, have been lucky. No Chris McCandless. A lesson that humbling before nature, but that makes me put down my hat to the memory of this young man because I could one day be in his place.