This is a great book and I was totally enthralled. Krakauer's writing is spectacular. It is such a personal story, made so not just by the author detailing his own experiences mountaineering, but also by incorporating McCandless's family in the suffering and loss of their son. Yet somehow Krakauer keeps it all grounded, presenting a strategically balanced view of McCandless himself despite what I must imagine to be a profound desire either to glorify him in his admirable quest for self-reliance, or to vilify him for the reckless audacity he demonstrated along the way. Or perhaps both. 
 Because that's the thing about McCandless's story. It isn't so much that it's difficult not to form an opinion of him one way or the other; it's that any opinion formed is bound to be fluid, rapidly shifting from veneration to condemnation and back again. It's fair to say McCandless was an estimable guy, not just talking in rhetoric about the societal evils of homelessness and hunger but actually going out and attempting to do something about it. It's also fair to say he was kind of an asshole, treating his parents with relentless cruelty on account of some unrealistic moral standards he for some reason held them to. But he wasn't an asshole for going to Alaska, seemingly unpreparedly, and succumbing to what he should have known better to avoid. For that he was only a kid, a kid who took big risks (as kids are wont to do), but ultimately a kid who just got unlucky. 
 One thing I kept thinking about while reading this book is the idea of self-reliance. Because it isn't really an absolute, right? There are degrees to which one can be self-reliant. I mean, even Thoreau went into town periodically to buy tools or to barter for whatever. Does that invalidate his approach? Did McCandless take the concept to an extreme by forsaking a map because maps are drawn by other human beings? (The answer to that is YES.) But by the same token, what is wrong with categorizing our own lives as "self-reliant" if we are able to perform all of our daily tasks without the assistance of others? I don't really endorse this argument, by the way. I'm only saying that I think there is value in striving toward a state of self-reliance, but I simultaneously hold that survivability will certainly drop to zero the closer one actually comes to completely attaining it.