And he wanted to, you know, he was just being sadistic and he wanted to study the symptoms. It had been known since at least 400 B.C. He fed them this seed of the grass pea, which had been eaten for centuries and had been known to be toxic under certain conditions. And at this concentration camp, one of the officers decided to conduct this grotesque experiment where he fed the inmates a plant called grass pea, very similar to the plant that McCandless ate, the wild potato. And he was familiar with this concentration camp called Vapniarca in the Ukraine during World War II where Jews were kept. I mean, he, you know, Hamilton deserves the credit for this. And it was a place no one had thought to look before or no one I knew about, and it was brilliant. And by chance, I came across this essay by Ronald Hamilton.Д¬ORNISH: And this gentleman named Ron Hamilton helps you get to the bottom of things, right, from an unlikely place, right? He looks to World War II and concentration camp victims. I mean, how do I reconcile what the chemist said with what McCandless' journal said? So I just kept combing the scientific literature. He said, you know, I tore this plant apart. And the chemist - they came back and the chemist said, no, these plants aren't poisonous. So I sent these seeds - I collected some seeds when I visited the bus and sent these seeds to an esteemed biochemist in Fairbanks and had them tested. Well, this led me to conclude, as it would almost anybody, that the seeds had somehow laid him low, maybe killed him outright. And then a little over three weeks later, on August 18, he crawled in the back of the bus and died. After that, there's other signs in his journal that, you know, he was in big trouble.

You know, before this entry, there's nothing to suggest he was in trouble. Until the end of July, there's this ominous journal entry, July 30th. So he decided just to keep living at the bus, foraging food, killing small game. So that's where he lived for most of these three and a half months.

And he stumbled upon it by chance, and it had this wood stove in it and a bed in the back and it was - it's in a pretty place, and he thought it was a great place to make it his base camp.

It had been used for many years by hunters and trappers out at the stampede trails it's called, like a day's journey from the road. So he.Д¬ORNISH: And this is a bus that was a makeshift shelter that was just out there already. So things were going pretty well in July when he - early July when he returned to the bus after trying and failing to cross the river because it was so hot. So - and his photographs show what he was eating. So - and he also took a lot of photographs that were recovered with his body, several rolls of film. He recorded the weather on pieces of birch bark. But he recorded all the food that he killed. KRAKAUER: Well, the journal is very brief and cryptic, so you have to interpret it. And what did it tell you about how he lived and how he died? Jon, welcome to the program.Д¬ORNISH: So a lot of what people know about Christopher McCandless came from his journal, right? He actually kept writing about his experience. Krakauer joins us now from Boulder, Colorado. Jon Krakauer had a theory: Unintentional poisoning. It's called 'Into the Wild.' But one core mystery remained: Was McCandless' journey a slow-motion suicide mission, the results of recklessness or ignorance about the realities of living in the wild? Or was his death an accident? The story of Christopher McCandless and his short, fatal experiment with simple living was exhaustively explored in a 1996 book by Jon Krakauer. Four months later, emaciated and helpless, he died. I'm Audie Cornish.Д«ack in 1992, a young man headed into the Alaskan wilderness seeking a new way of life, perhaps an escape from the modern world. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

Into the wild book on tape