The vast majority of rapes, well over eighty percent, are actually non-stranger rapes. One of the other myths, he added, was the widely held belief that a non-stranger assault is less serious and has...
When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were precisely what he was se...
When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded hi...
Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s ne...
Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story….[R]ather,...
There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the...
The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and
Suffice it to say that [Everest] has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen, and that all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth.… My darling this is a thrilling busine...
Rape, Boylan pointed out, is the only crime in which the victim is presumed to be lying.
Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.
On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother’s h...
On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's Family Happiness, having marked several passages that moved him:He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others......
Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has dim...
Narcissists erupt with self-righteous indignation whenever they believe others are breaking rules, acting unfairly, or getting more than their fair share of the pie. They have no compunction about bre...
My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.
Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don't want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I'm living like this by choice.
In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young...
I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of twenty-three, personal mortality—the idea of my own death—was still largely outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Bo...
I don’t think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing...