I would love to see a Krakauer book about a bunch of guys who have their shit together and triumph over adversity through planning and foresight. But then, that would be a Michael Lewis book.

I remember precisely the moment when the world ended. It wasn't the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89. It wasn't the dissolution of the Soviet Union in '91. It was Sotheby's auction of the Soviet space program in '93.

Only 45 years elapsed between the first terrifying beeps of Sputnik and the first hit of the gavel dispatching the crown jewels of Soviet technology to the highest bidder but those 45 years defined our lives. My great grandparents escaped the Tsar. We had friends whose grandparents got out of Moldova just in time, taking with them the crown jewels of some lesser duchy. Non-Iron-Curtain Europe was generations back to us and there it was, a blip in the back pages of Newsweek, a human interest story about Gagarin's space suit available to the highest bidder.

They shelled the Kremlin and nothing happened. Everything we knew was wrong and there was a lot of searching. it would be facetious for me to argue Christopher McCandless was at all interested in the Cold War but there was a very real sense that the universe was changing if you were young and impressionable in the early '90s.