Documentary biographical writing is not celebrated for its prime literariness. Into the Wild, however, features many of the narrative qualities that mark the best novels. Krakauer's deft interweaving of diverse personalities and locations lend his work a crisp credibility and resonance, while enabling the author to shape a sustained drama from the facts and figures that comprise the documentary materials at hand. His generous and candid descriptions of his varied interviewees eschew cliches and add color and texture to this book.

Krakauer has made Into the Wild a much more complicated book by including many intertexts in the form of thoughtfully placed epigraphs and excerpts from the books that influenced Chris, as well as some anecdotal stories about other young adventurers whose attraction to nature also proved fatal. Krakauer even relates a hairraising tale from his own youth that resonates with the same idealism and stubborn...