Read this book with my ninth-grade literature class. My students were initially intrigued, often times baffled by the character of Chris McCandless and his story. Jon Krakauer goes into painstaking detail, and the book catalogs the effort to find that painstaking detail. But this is largely where to book goes wrong. It doesn't feel cohesive and it often lost us as readers. McCandless' story can be inspiring but bogged down by pages of minuscule detail, loose conjecture, and stories of different adventurers that don't relate to McCandless' own, the power of witnessing McCandless' short but passionate life is all but snuffed out. You can tell that the book is not Krakauer's preferred form. As one of my students said, "this is why no one reads magazines anymore."