Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer
In 1992, college student Chris McCandless took the fabled road less traveled. He gave away all his stuff, hoofed around the country for a while and eventually hiked into the Alaskan wilderness. A moose hunter found his rotting corpse four months later.
Who among us hasn’t dreamed of doing the same thing? Into The Wild appeals to that sense of yearning, but it shows how adventure can quickly become a nightmare for those unprepared—or, in McCandless’ case, unwilling—to temper their loftier ideals with a dose of reality.
Krakauer does a wonderful job of reconstructing McCandless with the scanty material he has to work with and presents us with a compelling and disturbing sketch of a young man who was too idealistic—and stubborn—for his own good.