5 reviews for Wild : A Journey From Lost To Found
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Wild : A Journey From Lost To Found
by Cheryl Strayed
Description:
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State and she would do it alone.
Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
About The Author
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch, the huge New York Times-bestselling memoir Wild and the collection of essays Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure and The Rumpus. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Skryf Review
“‘Good Reading”
Ira
So much baggage. As a backpacker myself, I cringed to read about hoisting a backpack so heavy that she could only strap it on while sitting on the ground. How she managed to balance that pack and not let it accidentally fling her off the Sierras, even after Albert put that bag on a diet, is beyond me. And those tight boots that ate her toenails and mangled her feet into a fine pulp!! If nothing else, those boots end up being a fine advertisement for REI’s amazing customer service. While I’m happy she survived, her early hiking tales scared me. I hope there are no hapless hikers thinking they too can head out as unprepared as her. And it took so long to get to the actual hiking. Like her backpack, there’s so much personal drama to unload. So much grief. Over her mom’s death, over the childhood she didn’t get, over her self-destroyed marriage and other poor life choices. If you’re simply looking for tales of adventure on the PCT, you’re going to be disappointed. The PCT is only the backdrop and therapist to all that personal drama. You slog through overwrought drama more than scenic mountainscapes in this book. Thank heavens, by the end of the trip, she’s unloaded and discarded a lot of the figurative and literal baggage. Backpacking really is magic like that, if the excess weight doesn’t fling you over the edge first.
Hiten
I think those readers are missing the point. This is not a how-to book. Although there are some brief informative sections about the history and development of the PCT, as well as fleeting references to equipment. It is not a back to nature book. She writes picturesque but unsentimental descriptions. It is not a self-help book. She’s not espousing any means to self discovery. It is a eloquent story of how one rather mixed up young woman used this journey. Alone, she is able to dig deep into her past and her fears. There comes a point in everyone’s life when we have to forgive our own mistakes and accept how they define us. The struggles along the trail gave her the strength and clarity to face who she really is and what she is capable of. It resonated with me. After having taken a road trip in the mid 70’s, from Minneapolis, to Whitehorse Yukon Territories, back through Edmonton, across the Rockies to Vancouver and down Route 1 to San Diego before going home. The experiences most definitely frame who I am
arif
I have read a great many criticisms of this book by people who either expected it to be solely about the PCT itself, or were offended by the author’s use of coarse language and discussion of her sexual proclivities. And that’s fine; all of those readers were obviously seeking something other than what this book had to provide. Myself, I enjoyed it from cover to cover. A longtime lover of the PCT, I already know about the trail from end to end. I was more interested in how the author used a rather spontaneous journey along the trail to help herself face demons and come to grips with her mother’s death. There are moments where her emotions are so clearly spelled out on the page, and then there are times where you have to read between the lines. But every step of the way you’re alongside her, watching as she learns to accept, to embrace, to let go, and how the PCT weaves through that.This is a book I will most definitely read multiple times over the years. I almost regret buying it in Kindle format because I can think of at least five people I’d love to loan it to and demand they read it immediately.
Angaan
A few years ago I had occasion to re-read HATCHET, by Gary Paulsen. I did not do this on my own, but with a fourth-grade boy who was wholly entranced by it. I had never been a big HATCHET fan myself (I preferred the Little House books, if you wanted to get right down to it), but reading it with this kid gave me a new appreciation for what the book allowed us both to do: live in the terrifying wilderness, live in the terrifying aloneness, live in the brave and cold and the that which seems both impossible and necessary. To dig into the vast resources of human resourcefulness, knowing that no matter the outcome, you did exactly the best you could do. Everything painful is written about with warmth and something I just, I don’t know if I have a good word for it? I have a couple not-good words. Reality. Actuality. Something. See, it’s not: this awful thing happened, and I have written well about it, and I have settled the accounts and all is fine high-five. But rather: this thing happened, and it was hard, and that is what things are. Things are hard. They are not impossible and far away and only written about in memoirs where people do incredible things. The things that happened to Cheryl felt like things that have happened and will happened to me. They are present. Your water will sometimes be filthy and you will be able to fix it; your water has been filthy and you will be able to fix it; your water will sometimes be nonexistent and even then you will survive; your water has sometimes been nonexistent and even then you have survived. Because while I will probably never hike the PCT, because while I will probably not go through the things that Cheryl went through on her way to the PCT, I have had my own share of what I’ve had. And her chant, her present-tense chant on the trail (I am not afraid, I am not afraid) is the kind of chant any one of us might have, doing any one of the hundreds of things we must do to live our lives. That is what this book is about, to me. It’s beautiful. I want to give it to people.