#101 in Biography & memoir
Into the Wild
- 284
- Pages
- about 5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
Krakauer does more than retell how Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness: he sets it beside comparable cases and his own experience, and that context is what lifts the book. It conveys both the pull of the wild and its harshness. Reactions depend heavily on what one makes of McCandless himself, whom some readers find merely reckless, and a few find the telling dull. For readers of true stories that resist an easy verdict.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Into the Wild is a 1996 non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It is an expansion of a 9,000-word article by Krakauer on Chris McCandless titled "Death of an Innocent", which appeared in the January 1993 issue of Outside. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007, directed by Sean Penn with Emile Hirsch starring as McCandless. Into the Wild is an international bestseller that has been printed in 30 languages and 173 editions and formats. The book is widely used in high-school and college reading curricula. Into the Wild has been lauded by many reviewers, and in 2019 was listed by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction works of the past quarter-century.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.8 across 1,131 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 88% of the weight and the score stays at 7.8 — the Biography & memoir average of 8.1 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 84 | 7% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 1K | 93% |
Frequently asked
How long is Into the Wild?
It has 284 pages — shorter than 61% of the ranked books in Biography & memoir.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Biography & memoir — with scores between 7.7 and 8.0, closest to this book.
