When was christopher mccandless born

Read more on Wikipedia. Since , the English Wikipedia page of Chris McCandless has received more than 4,, page views. His biography is available in 35 different languages on Wikipedia up from 34 in Chris McCandless is the nd most popular explorer up from th in , the 2,th most popular biography from United States up from 3,th in and the 13th most popular American Explorer.

Afterwards the couple had one more child, a daughter named Carine. McCandless also had six half-siblings from Walt's first marriage, who lived with their mother in California. Author Jon Krakauer later speculated that Walt's transition between these two marriages affected McCandless deeply and shaped his worldview.

In , the family relocated to Washington, D. The couple went on to establish a successful consultancy business out of their home, specializing in Walt's area of expertise.

McCandless graduated from W. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, in He excelled academically, although a number of teachers and fellow students observed that he "marched to the beat of a different drummer. In the summer of , McCandless traveled to Southern California and reconnected with distant relatives and friends. It was during this journey he learned that his father had not yet divorced his first wife when McCandless and his sister Carine were born, and had apparently maintained somewhat of a double life before the move to Virginia.

It is speculated that this discovery had a profound impact on the younger McCandless. McCandless graduated from Emory University in May , with a bachelor's degree in the double majors of history and anthropology.

An avid outdoorsman, McCandless completed several lengthy wilderness hiking trips and paddled a canoe down a portion of the Colorado River before hitchhiking to Alaska in April By the end of summer in , McCandless had driven his Datsun through California, Arizona, and South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator in Carthage. A flash flood disabled his car, at which point he removed its license plates, took what he could carry, and kept moving on foot.

His car was later found, repaired, and put into service as an undercover vehicle for the local police department. He was last seen alive at the head of the Stampede Trail on April 28 by a local electrician named Jim Gallien, who had given McCandless a ride from Fairbanks to the start of the rugged track just outside the small town of Healy. Gallien later said he had been seriously concerned about the safety of McCandless who introduced himself as "Alex" after noticing his light pack, minimal equipment, meager rations, and obvious lack of experience.

Gallien tried repeatedly to persuade McCandless to delay the trip, at one point offering to detour to Anchorage and buy him suitable equipment and supplies. However, McCandless ignored Gallien's persistent warnings and refused his offers of assistance though McCandless did accept a pair of Xtratufs, two sandwiches, and a packet of corn chips from Gallien. Gallien dropped McCandless off believing he would head back towards the highway within a few days as hunger set in. He had 4. Self-portrait photographs and journal entries indicate he foraged for edible plants and hunted game.

McCandless hunted porcupines, squirrels, and birds, such as ptarmigans and Canada geese. On June 9, , he stalked and shot a moose. However, the meat spoiled within days after McCandless failed to properly preserve it. It has been speculated that McCandless may have been responsible for vandalizing several cabins in the area that were stocked with food, survival equipment, and emergency supplies.

McCandless' journal documents days in the area. There is also a documentary on the Chris McCandless story. You can read more here.

Day 4: Magic bus day. Day 9: Weakness. Day Snowed in. Day Porcupine day Day Misery. Day Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Gourmet duck! Day Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don't know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life. Day Beaver Dam. Day Rained in, river looks impossible.

On June 28, , an year-old student named Gavrilo Princip fired a pistol in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and changed the world. Ferdinand was aware of the danger — earlier that day he had deflected a bomb hurled at him by another would-be assassin, The Times reported.

Many contemporary accounts say the bomb actually bounced off the car. He was traveling to visit people injured in that blast when he was killed. Such courage, or perhaps obstinacy, was typical for Ferdinand. After the assassination Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Soon Europe, and much of the world, spiraled into war as one country after another, enmeshed in a web of previously established alliances, took sides — either with the Central Powers Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies or the Allies France, Britain, Russia and others, including, eventually, the United States.

What became known as the Great War, or later World War I, would prove to be more devastating than any that had come before. Those two shots brought the world to arms, and the war that followed has brought devastation upon three continents and profoundly affected two others, and the tocsin has sounded in the remotest islands of the sea. Towns have been bombarbed in the Society Islands and battles have been fought in all the oceans, from the extremity of South America to the Malay Peninsula, from the heart of Africa to the coast of China.

Nation after nation has been drawn into the whirlpool, and more are drawing toward it, and the end is far off. What face the world will wear when it is all over no man can predict, but it will be greatly changed, and not geographically alone.

During the four years that followed, millions of young men died as they scrambled between trenches or were killed by disease and chemical weapons like mustard gas.

There were more than 30 million servicemen killed or wounded. By the time an armistice was declared in , a generation had lost its innocence, and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were inspired by the malaise of their contemporaries. The war formally ended when the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles , agreeing reluctantly to terms dictated by the Allied forces.

The date was June 28, , exactly five years after Ferdinand was killed. In 20 years the world would be at war again, the wounds of World War I never having fully healed. An earlier version of this article misidentified the country that Austria-Hungary declared war on after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

It was Serbia, not Bosnia. They were both fighters. They had both devoted themselves to defending what was right. And they were both nearing 50 on June 27, , as a summer night fell over Greenwich Village. By the time the sun came up, however, Mr. Pine, a deputy police inspector, and Ms. DeLarverie, a cross-dressing lesbian singer, were standing together at an intersection of history — even if they were on opposite sides of what appeared at first to be an old-fashioned donnybrook outside a mobbed-up bar.

It was Deputy Inspector Pine who led the police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street that night; the night that queer patrons fought back. And it was Ms. No one dared cross her, Ms. DeLarvarie said. For the police, a raid on a joint like the Stonewall had been, until June , a no-brainer. Gay bars were often controlled by organized crime.

Corraling homosexuals was a good way for officers to boost their arrest records. Pine said when discussing the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Until they did. Pine apologized for the raid in , six years before his death on Sept. Not Forgotten is asking that of influential people this summer in a series of posts called Breaking Bread. A raconteur who loved good food, a fine cigar and a stiff drink, he would also be a convivial table guest.

Brokaw wrote. And in his imagination he put himself there, with some specific questions in mind:. Sir Winston, I am limited to three questions, which is the interview equivalent of a teaspoon of domestic champagne. Were there any moments after one of your famous speeches that you privately thought Great Britain was in greater peril than you let on? Was that a humbling sign that the best days of the British Empire were in the past?

You had a lifetime of cigars, brandy, wine and very little exercise. You were a prisoner of war and escaped. Your political career seemed to be over in the s, but your glory days were yet to come. You lived to Was it your indomitable will, or was it a higher being looking out for you?

Sir, your country has been an empire, a leading member of a western alliance and now has voted to go it alone. Is this wise? Scientists racing to develop a vaccine against Zika virus disease this summer may be hoping for results like those of Dr.

Jonas Salk, creator of the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis. Salk died on this day in at the age of 80, decades after the polio vaccine he developed helped vanquish the deadly, paralyzing disease throughout much of the world.

Schmeck Jr. The discovery made Dr. Salk a hero. Schmeck wrote. In recent years, however, fears of rare, vaccine-preventable diseases have subsided.

Albert B. Sabin, who developed a live polio virus vaccine that ultimately replaced the use of Dr. The live vaccine, given orally, is easier and cheaper to administer, and is particularly useful during epidemics because a vaccinated person temporarily sheds the vaccine virus and can passively immunize others.

It was precisely because of this risk that, five years after Dr. Children in America now exclusively receive the inactivated poliovirus vaccine , known as IPV, that resulted from Dr. Worldwide eradication of the disease has remained an elusive goal. This year and last, polio cases unrelated to the vaccine have occurred in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Earlier in the decade, children in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and more than a dozen other countries were infected by wild polio virus.

Vaccination campaigns have sometimes been thwarted by war and distrust of medical teams. Even after she ascended to worldwide stardom, she constantly sought the love, adulation and acceptance that she felt had eluded her since childhood. The seeds of her discontent were sown when she was very young.

She had a strained relationship with her mother, a fierce stage parent, and was devastated when her beloved father died of meningitis in Garland said she was on a lifelong quest for love.

She was married five times and was quoted as saying she longed for the sincere love of one man, rather than the applause of thousands of fans. Garland turned to drugs and alcohol to fill the void. She died from an apparently accidental barbiturate overdose. She was At least I hope she has. Her rosy complexion as a toddler gave her the nickname Pinky. She returned to the United States 16 years later, in , not as Pinky but as Benazir Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan — the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country.

Her time in office would be as tumultuous as her childhood had been idyllic, ending in her assassination by the Pakistani Taliban on Dec. Bhutto was born on this day in to a wealthy family whose lands were once so extensive it took days to appraise them. In a country where families dominated business and politics in an almost feudal manner, the Bhuttos seemed destined to rule. As Ms. He imparted lessons to her along the way. But her political education went into overdrive when a top army general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, overthrew her father and imprisoned him.

Bhutto visited him often, absorbing one-on-one political seminars in the grimmest of settings. Her father encouraged her to study other female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc. Bhutto was hanged in , charged with orchestrating the murder of a political rival. Bhutto was forbidden to attend his funeral. But as the opposition to a military regime, Ms.

Bhutto spent half her time in prison or under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement. She was elected twice, serving from December to August and again from October to November Bhutto could be imperial in bearing, charming and also ruthless.

After accusing her government of corruption, her younger brother Murtaza, a member of the provincial legislature, was gunned down outside his home in a police ambush. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she had named minister of investment, was indicted in the murder but exonerated. Witnesses were either arrested, intimidated or killed. Each of her terms as prime minister ended when she was dismissed by the president on graft charges. When she and her husband left office in , they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the source of their wealth was unclear.

Bhutto spent most of the last nine years of her life in self-imposed exile, much of it in a palatial estate in Dubai. After receiving amnesty on the pending charges, she returned in late to seek a third term. A close ally of the Afghan Taliban — which her government supported in its infancy in — killed her at a rally outside the capital. Pakistan still waits today for a real democracy to emerge, and an elected leader from outside the few feudal families that have ruled the country, alternating with the military, since its birth.

In New York City, Siegel was a core member of the infamous hit squad Murder Incorporated and implicated in many high-profile killings.

But Siegel, who died in a hail of bullets 69 years ago today , was also something of a visionary. He eventually moved west and pioneered the development of Las Vegas as a casino capital, investing in it when it was little more than a sleepy desert town with a pliant City Council and lax gambling regulations.

In New York, Siegel, a product of the tough streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, was, like his associate Meyer Lansky, a kingpin in what was known as the Jewish mob. Seeking to expand his empire, he left New York City in the s to set up bootlegging and gambling operations on the West Coast.

But Siegel wanted more. When the casino struggled at first, Siegel used millions of dollars from mob investors to prop it up. Without him, the Flamingo would have folded. On June 20, , he was shot through the living room window of Ms. The casino he built in her name endured until , when the last of the original buildings were razed and replaced by Hilton. He wrote about his father, Wyatt Cooper, a screenwriter and actor from Mississippi.

The paper was lying on the kitchen counter, and I was startled to see his face staring up at me as I passed by. It was two days after his death. The article was short. What would happen to my family and me now? As a teenager I used to imagine that he had written me a letter, and every birthday I secretly hoped it would arrive.

After a while, no matter how much you love someone, no matter how hard you try to remember, you start to forget little details — the sound of their voice, the way they smell, the look in their eyes when they smile and laugh.

If I could see my father just once more, sit down and talk with him, look into his crystal blue eyes, feel the safety of his arms around me, I would give anything for that. Is he proud of me? What would he have done if he were me? I just turned 49, and my doctor assures me I have many years yet to live. What path forward should I take? How should I live out these years I never expected to have, these years he never lived to see?

For his confirmation gift, his parents gave him a telescope. His imagination was piqued as a student in Berlin when he read about a phantasmagorical journey to the moon. When he died on June 16, , Wernher von Braun , the son of East Prussian aristocrats, had left an indelible, if ambiguous, legacy as a visionary space-travel pioneer. They were scooped up in Operation Paperclip and transplanted in Alabama, where they formed the vanguard of an American space program that built the Saturn V rocket, which sent nine crews toward the moon.

He would say later that his chief goal was always space travel — eventually a permanent moon base and a mission to Mars — and that his V-2 rockets had worked perfectly, except that they landed on the wrong planet. As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang:. Unlike many of her jazz world contemporaries — the list is practically endless — she was abstemious. When she was not onstage or on tour, where she spent most of her life, she preferred tranquil days at her Beverly Hills home and a placid social life with friends like Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee.

Yet her quiet, abstemious side probably contributed to her longevity; her career lasted six decades. Fitzgerald had a protean voice. She sang show tunes, swing, bebop, novelties, bossa nova and opera. An inscrutable point in space, which contains all other points simultaneously, inspires a poet, and revenge.

Despairing curators wander in a labyrinthine library stocked with innumerable, unintelligible books. A mild-mannered reader dreams of gauchos, knife fights and death. These and all other manner of the mystical, enigmatic and paradoxical imbued the writing of Jorge Luis Borges , an Argentine author whose concise, intricate work overflowed with wonder.

He penned densely philosophical short stories and poems of his own and literary hoaxes that intentionally blurred the line between reality and fiction. Borges was widely considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, but he never received it. Some speculated that the Nobel committee overlooked Mr. Borges because of his reluctance to engage with the political violence that engulfed Argentina in the 20th Century.

But Mr. Borges, an otherworldly figure himself, preferred the printed page to our unruly and unwelcoming reality. That reality grew more distant when he went blind in the s and was forced to rely on others to transcribe his words and read to him. He departed this world for good when he died of liver cancer on June 14, Toward the end of his life, however, Mr. Borges said he recognized himself in his most fantastical writing.

Borges said. Clinton replied. In he asked president George W. Bush replied. A war of choice or a war of necessity? For almost 17 years as moderator Mr. The show regularly reached an audience of almost four million people.

And he was working until the end. Below is a tribute episode that aired after his death. Russert covered elections through the s and early s. In one memorable instance he brought comprehensible analysis to the confusing ballot tumult in Florida in the presidential election that ended with a Supreme Court decision and victory for Mr. Russert was an unlikely candidate for broadcast stardom. The son of a garbage collector from Buffalo, N. Mario M. Cuomo of New York. He was meaty and sometimes cross-looking with his dramatically knitted eyebrows; he could be prosecutorial one moment and jovial the next.

He joined NBC in as an executive. The show still draws a comparable number of viewers with Chuck Todd occupying Mr. Today we have David H. Petraeus, a former C. Besides celebrating writers and those in the arts, the club, in Midtown Manhattan, has also recognized military and government leaders including the former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and me at its annual state dinners. Hosting Grant — a great writer as well as a great leader — at the Lotos Club would thus be very fitting.

He would feel welcome there. Coincidentally, the lovely old townhouse that houses the club, on East 66th Street just off Fifth Avenue, is next door to the address at which Grant lived the final years of his life. I have long admired Grant and felt that some historians were unduly critical of him at various points in the last century although more recent biographies have once again recognized his extraordinary qualities and how fortunate we were to have him in uniform during the Civil War, in particular.

In my view, Grant stands alone among American military leaders as hugely impressive at all three levels of war: tactically as shown in his capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee early in the war ; operationally the Vicksburg victory in , one of the greatest operational-level campaigns of all time ; and strategically devising and overseeing the first truly comprehensive strategy for the Union forces to defeat Robert E. Especially impressive was his sheer fortitude in the face of congressional sniping, press criticism, political pressures, battlefield setbacks and terrible casualties.

Most important, as the first Union commander to come up with a comprehensive strategy to defeat the Confederate forces, he was the first to give battle to Lee and not retreat back to Washington immediately afterward.

And although as president he was tarnished by financial scandal after placing too much trust in some members of his cabinet, he sought to be compassionate during the Indian Wars and in the conduct of Reconstruction, and demonstrated integrity in guiding the nation through a host of financial crises.

And he was modest and unassuming in all that he did. They are still regarded as the most literate, forthright memoirs of any major American military figure. With the help of Mark Twain, the memoirs were an enormous commercial success when published after Grant died, on July 23, , at an Adirondacks retreat. Twain, by the way, was among the earliest members of the Lotos Club. For me, Grant was always captured best in the pithy response he offered to Gen. Sherman had emerged from the darkness to encounter Grant sitting under a tree with the rain dripping off his slouch hat.

A life of crime is usually lived in the shadows. But John Gotti, the longtime boss of the Gambino crime family, preferred the spotlight. He was a publicity hound long before social media and smartphones made oversharing ubiquitous. Bruce Mouw, a former F. Gotti died on June 10, , in a federal prison in Springfield, Mo. Gotti took control of the Gambino family after engineering the assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, in He went on to make flagrant power moves , courting the press all the while.

He cut a dashing figure, draped in expensive double-breasted suits that might as well have been suits of armor, as far as prosecutors were concerned. Raab wrote. Gotti relished the attention. He knew his every move was being scrutinized but never let his observers feel that they had the upper hand. On April 2, , Gotti was convicted on 13 counts, among them a racketeering charge that cited him for five murders and other murder charges, conspiracy, gambling, obstruction of justice and tax fraud.

Yearning for the spotlight ran in the family. Nice looking. Not at all like her stamp. Wears her watch over the glove, though — tacky.

Joan Rivers, the irrepressible and sharply acerbic comedian, would have been 83 today, and since her death almost two years ago , she has left a celebrity-skewering void that can still be felt during every major red carpet event, from the Oscars to the Grammys, where the glitterati were sitting ducks for her as she hosted the E!

You are a one of a one. Rivers died undergoing a routine procedure in New York City. A settlement in a malpractice lawsuit filed by Ms. But beyond the red carpet, we remember Ms. She paved the way for generations of comedians, distinguishing herself with slashing style and biting self-deprecation, even about her death. But she was fired after she got her own show. Then her husband committed suicide. Driven by despair and desperation, she reinvented herself as a writer, producer and entrepreneur.

No one was spared. A contributor and critic for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and a founding member of the informal gathering of literati known as the Algonquin Round Table, she delivered withering, seemingly effortless bons mots. She died of a heart attack on June 7, Parker dispensed caustic humor in prose and verse as well as over drinks.

Her observations and remarks were very much of their time, but they still induce winces in an era when cutting snark has become practically de rigueur. Over the years many couplets and witticisms have been attributed to Parker, some apocryphally. Here are just a few:. The suggestion was taken.

Kennedy, had just claimed victory in the California presidential primary in a rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he, like his brother four and a half years earlier, was felled by an assassin. He died 20 hours later, the first assassination of an American presidential candidate.

His death, just two months after the Rev. Anthony Lukas wrote in The Times. Kennedy had been revered by many as a political savior in a turbulent time and despised by others as ruthless and opportunistic. In his eulogy, Senator Edward M. Kennedy urged that his brother be judged at face value. Californians, 48 years later, go to the polls Tuesday. When Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic in Iran, was buried in , three days after his death on June 3, all international phone lines in the country were cut and international flights halted.

His obituary in The New York Times was almost 3, words but quick to encapsulate the man, a Shiite Muslim cleric, and his importance to Iran and the world:.