Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
If you were assigned to read about Christopher Columbus, I would suggest this modern day adventuring Chris instead. Christopher McCandless was a twenty-something nature loving college graduate looking for adventure. Unfortunately, in this advanced technological age, there just wasn’t too much frontier left for him to explore. He hitched around out West for awhile with no car and very little money, just to see how far he could push himself. But he found that just moving around on the edge of civilization wasn’t extreme enough, so he decided to trek up to the last great American wilderness left–Alaska. Only a few months after he was last seen heading out into the Land of the Midnight Sun, his body was found in an abandoned school bus in the wilderness, where he had apparently starved to death. What made him do it? Was his crazy camping trip a suicide mission or just a good plan gone wrong? True adventure author Jon Krakauer has taken Chris’s life, death and thirst for the extreme and turned it into a first rate biography. You may not have the same fanatical wanderlust as Chris McCandless, (and I hope you don’t, you see what it got him)but nevertheless, this book speaks to the would-be rock-climbing, parachute-jumping runaway in all of us. And the movie, starring Emile Hirsch and directed by Sean Penn ain’t bad either.