There is no doubt that on April 15, 1992 Christopher Johnson McCandless set out on his last Alaskan Odyssey-leaving Carthage, South Dakota, friends and societal restrictions behind. Having finished university, and having abandoned his sense of family, he had been steadfastly looking forward to this adventuresome feat for some time; planning to hike into the wilderness and survive off the land, subsistence style. Trekking into the unknown to uncover something buried beneath the confines of society, his ill-prepared endeavor was an outrageous abuse of his fortunate upbringing and education. We can all learn through McCandless demise that the value of education is to cherish, and above all, use our education. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's beautiful and arresting narrative details the story of a young man's life and quest to discover the purpose of his existence. Together with the people McCandless knew along the way, Krakauer constructs a delicate and haunting tale that paints a romantically tragic picture of the life that was lived by an idealistic dreamer and hero whose self-induced misfortune suffered him to perish, alone, in the wild.
             The question everybody has been asking for the past 12 years is: Why did this educated upper crust man run away? What was he trying to prove? The answer is simple: Christopher McCandless, an avid reader and admirer of Tolstoy and Thoreau, had more heartfelt conviction to seek out truth than does the average person. It was a conviction so strong that to let it lie would have been more detrimental than risking his life to make such a pilgrimage.
             He was no fool. The boy knew the gravity of the ordeal that lay before him. He embraced the challenge. It was a rite of passage-bigger than hitchhiking to Alaska, hiking 12 miles out of Healy and setting up camp for the summer with little provisions and no tools other than a gun for hunting. It was a self-invoked dedication to his spirit...