As someone who has had problems tramping before - albeit nothing at this disastrous scale, a broken bone and a sudden attack of fever is all I've ever had to deal with in the bush, and a kinder bush than the Alaskan at that - reading this has been an odd mix of sympathy and judgement. Things do go wrong when you go tramping in remote places, accidents happen, and when they do, well, if you're alone the problems are compounded. Yet I can't help but identify with McCandless, wanting to get away and experience the beauty and isolation as he does, because for all the increased risk there's something very attractive about being alone in the bush. I share his tendency there... to an extent. But I can't help but think that he goes beyond all common sense here, and that his eventual death was almost inevitable under the circumstances, leading directly from his choice to be so poorly prepared. (It's particularly hard not to feel for his poor family, who lost a son and brother to starvation because he was so over-confident he didn't even bother to take a map with him into the wild - a map that very likely could have saved him.) And for all this book is a hugely sympathetic account of McCandless' life - Krakauer clearly feels for his subject as well - it's hard not to see it as a cautionary tale of someone who loved nature just a tiny bit more than he respected it.