To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away from home and got exactly what he deserved. To others, McCandless stirs up thoughts of the intrepid explorers who once ventured forth into undiscovered lands, and of the wanderlust, the rage against the societal machine, and the thirst for what the author Jon Krakauer has termed "raw, transcendent experience." So what if all the earthly frontiers — the physical ones, anyway — appear to... More >>>