Krakauer's methods

In what ways were Krakauer's research and authoritative methods successful and unsuccessful in your opinion throughout his development of Into the Wild. Pick a couple examples from the text to back up your viewpoint.

Now that we have finally completed reading Into the Wild, I feel that Krakauer did a superb job of researching and interviewing people that Chris had met along his journey to Alaska. His very strength though, also proved to be one of his weaknesses. Krakauer interviewed multiple people such as "Ronald Franz" who is 90 years old and a survivor of 2 heart attacks. Krakauer asks kindly of Franz to recall things he had said to McCandless, events, and feelings from the previous year. I'm not sure about you, but as an 18 year old, I have quite a difficult time remembering the conversations I had with people a year ago (Krakauer 58). Clearly Franz wasn't in the best medical condition, since he had 2 heart attacks, so his credibility diminishes a little when he recites what he had said to Chris a year back. I don't want to sound like I am discriminating him, but considering his age, I can't entirely trust that what he told Krakauer is entirely true. This, I feel, is one of the ways in which I believe that Krakauer's research was unsuccessful. Also, as we had discussed in class...it is evident that Krakauer has been rooting for Chris for the entire book and there is no doubt in my mind that he omitted information so we would be persuaded to think that Chris was a really loving and good-hearted man who just wanted to experience life in the wild. With the potato seed/root and the interviews/letters that he chose to include all show Chris in a good light. Unfortunately for him, my opinion of Chris has not changed since the beginning of the semester. On the other hand, I think Krakauer was successful in the sense that he found letters that Chris, himself, had written to Westerberg, Burres, Franz, etc. Some of them are present in epigraphs while others can be read throughout the book such as on page 69. The letters are clear and solid proof of what McCandless was like when he was alive which made Krakauer successful in that sense. Overall, I think Krakauer's own personal feelings of McCandless overpowered that of his facts (logos) which made it difficult at times to believe what he had written.