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Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
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"I'd heard about John Krakauer's Into Thin Air before, and actually our school was thinking about adopting the book Into the Wild because what we're finding is we need more non-fiction in our high school curriculum. I was reading it to see if it would fit into our curriculum, and as soon as I opened it and connected with the character of Chris McCandless, I realized that this is gonna be a great book.
The book is about a young man named Chris McCandless, who grows up in an affluent community, graduates from high school, graduates from college, by all accounts is on his way to having a successful life; but he has this kind of wanderlust that's in him. When he graduates from college, he decides to just head out on the road, and he becomes basically what we would refer to as a tramp. He lives out of his car for a while, then when he loses his car, he just hoofs it. He goes on foot with his ultimate goal being that he's going to wind up in Alaska, the great wilderness.
It's really good for high school students because many high school students, and actually adolescents in general, find themselves in this kind of crisis sometimes, of independence, where they feel that they want to be independent from their parents but they don't quite have the skill set to be able to go out on their own. This is kind of what Chris has.
His style's a little bit hard to get used to. He uses a lot of big words, and sometimes you're not really sure why he's using these big words. Sometimes you think he's using these big words just to show what a great vocabulary he has. He also goes off on tangents and tells stories about other people who have done similar things -- kind of equally stupid things, going out in the wild unprepared -- and you kind of ask yourself, "Is it really important to hear all these other stories?"
I think in a way, young men would like this book because it's someone taking that physical challenge to see what a young man especially could do out in the wild, kind of like a bravado type of thing. I'd give it a four out of five. It's a great story. It's a one in a million story about a young man who is very likable and makes us think about the decisions that we make and how we kind of test ourselves in our own lives."
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