Krakauer has an economic interest in promoting the notion of the life-at-the-edge vision quest, because that is what sells his writing. Into the Wild explores that through looking at McCandless, with lots of Krakauer autobiography as illumination. Into Thin Air explores the notion through the vehicle of the 1996 Everest tragedy, with similar autobiographical asides.. He seems to advocate a sort of Outdoor Magazine Philosophy, analogous to the Playboy Philosophy of the sixties: men have the need to experience outdoor adventure, and acting in stupid, self-serving and self-destructive ways in meeting this need is okay, because of the importance of being fully and validly men.

In each book, Krakauer provides a huge list of bad decisions without comment, and then focuses enormous energy on analyzing the last bad decisions-McCandless' diet, Boukreev's decisions- as if all of the previous bad decisions could have been redeemed by better choices at the end.

And it works. Sells books, sells magazines, and encourages folks to try similar stuff, as ill-conceived publicity of a suicide bumps up the suicide rate. Fortunately, forums like this one promulgate better thinking in these matters, and are the best antidote to this stuff.