You probably remember the story of Chris McCandless: He was the dreamy young idealist who, after jacking himself up on too much campfire literature (Jack London, Thoreau, Tolstoy) about self-reliance, gave away his large family inheritance, his car, and most of his belongings and marched into the Alaskan wilderness north of Mt. McKinley three years ago in order to find -- as Jon Krakauer puts it in "Into the Wild" -- "raw, transcendent experience." What McCandless found instead was too much cold and not enough food. A party of moose hunters discovered his decomposing body, along with a thin journal of his final days, a few months later. This well-publicized story touched a chord in many people (Krakauer's article about McCandless in Outside magazine was nominated for a National Magazine Award), and it also engendered some hot debate. Was McCandless merely another "half-cocked dreamy greenhorn" (as one Outside letter writer put it) who didn't respect nature enough to plan his trip more wisely, or was he (as Krakauer seems to feel) a kind of confused, but oddly keen, moral beacon, worthy of praise for his "courage and noble ideals" in renouncing bourgeois society?

No matter which side you plop down on, it's difficult to read "Into the Wild" and not feel that Krakauer himself is the real half-cocked greenhorn here; his book turns a gripping story into sentimental hagiography. While searching frantically for McCandless's emotional Rosebud, Krakauer retraces the young man's life in numbing and often unintentionally hilarious detail, reprinting his college newspaper editorials, interviewing his former co-workers at a McDonald's ("One thing I do remember is that he had a thing about socks," a baffled assistant manager reports), and reprinting long quotations that McCandless had underlined in various books, including "Dr. Zhivago." Poor McCandless can't even stop in a small town to find work without Krakauer frisbeeing a halo around his head, noting his "affinity for the lumpen" or approvingly quoting an acquaintance who remembers, "He just had a way with animals." To his credit, Krakauer is a fluid writer, and the scenes of McCandless in the wild, ballasted by notes from the young man's journal, are undeniably compelling. But, for this reader, the final straw came when Krakauer began to paste his own life story alongside his subject's. "Like McCandless," Krakauer writes, "figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please." Yikes. Isn't one confusing medley enough?

-- Dwight Garner