This was the first audiobook I listened to for the year. It's actually a pretty depressing book, about a young man who went into the Alaska bush to live off the land for a summer and ended up starving to death. It's a true story too, written by an investigative journalist who wanted to find out about how this kid died and what he was wanting to do out there. I enjoyed Krakauer's writing style, but I thought he added in too many details about Chris McCandless's wanderings before he went to Alaska--it started to drag for me--and a random couple of chapters about his own Alaskan adventure when he was about the same age. The book wasn't very long, but I guess I thought it could have been even shorter. Krakauer also takes all of the potential "suspense" out of the book, by announcing that McCandless died while he was in Alaska in the very first chapter, so you don't actually wonder if he's going to make it--you just keep hearing about how it happened and what went on. It was really interesting, though, because it happened in 1992, while I was alive. But I'd never heard about it before. This is a book I recommended to Tommy because it seems so boy-ish (wait, no, I should say "manly") and he likes these adventure-type books.
No comments:
Post a Comment