Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23558 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-31
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

The Observer, 20 May, 2007
A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of
life itself, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work

Bill McKibben, The Ecologist, May, 2007
A major book by a major writer ... she writes like four kinds of
gorgeous ... Wild is the book that shows how it should be done.

Richard Mabey, The Times, 26 May 2007
'Incandescent... exhilarating...[Griffiths has] the intelligence
of a naturalist and the luminous originality of a visitor from another
planet... a profoundly important contribution... very readable'

Customer Reviews

a wonder of a book
An utter wonder of a book, at once vulnerable and ferocious, elegiac and giddy. It's a work that honestly engages the many-voiced vitality of the earth in all its elemental weirdness, a polyphonic fugue written in a style that for once matches the intensity of its topic. Luminously awake, politically astute, without a doubt "Wild" is the expression of a uniquely capacious intelligence, the song of a heart pulsing with compassion for divergent places, plants and creatures as they weather the insanity of contemporary civilization. Yet it's written with abundant empathy for the human animal, too, in our instinctive eloquence and our institutional stupidities. The author's rage sometimes nudges her into over-facile dichotomizing, but the polymorphous exuberance of her imagination steadily bursts the bounds of any such black-and-white theorizing. Meanwhile, her keen attunement to the music of language - and to the rootedness of words in the more-than-human soundscape of wave-surge and cricket-rhythm and thunder - enlivens this work with a magic that provokes the involvement of all one's senses. It's a deliciously erotic read.

Wild freedom, deep wisdom
`Wild' is a breathtaking masterpiece. It balances passion and energy with precise meticulous reflection and expression. It has the sweep of a great symphony with the subtlety of intricate craftsmanship.

`Wild' is the work of an artist. It takes as its pallet the four ancient elements, plus two, and explores the surface of the earth and its indigenous peoples in all its primal and feral reality and beauty. From the Amazon (earth) to the Arctic (ice), from the Sea Gypsies (water) to the Australian aborigines (fire) and the mountain peoples of West Papua (air); with a final moving personal meditation on the `wild mind.'

Jay Griffiths is intoxicated with the love and experience of freedom; she takes that deep archetypal sense of `wildness' and the longing `to be wild' and expresses it perfectly, profoundly and astonishingly. Her prose is sheer poetry. Whether reflecting on the exquisite culture that is woven into the very texture of the rainforest, or upon an understanding of `the kindness of the wilderness', the language, the ideas and the emotions are at times overwhelming. Jay loves words; their sounds, their connections and their meanings. Each word has precision, each sentence balanced and shaped to perfection; sometimes to draw out a deeply hidden treasure, most of the time simply to inspire us to dance with abandon. I shall be quoting whole paragraphs for years to come.

`Wild' is no travelogue, but rather the journal of a deeply personal journey to places described variously as `desolate', `nothingness' and `wasteland' and to meet people dismissed as `primitive' or `savages'. What Jay Griffiths reveals is that words like these tell us everything about the observer and nothing about what they claim to see. Vast expanses of land, water or ice are alive with vibrant contours and pulsating `songlines', voiced by their original peoples, have a presence and stories beyond imagining. Jay's thinking is profound and reflective, her insights and observations draw on wide reading around her subject (the bibliography is worth the price of the book alone).

Jay Griffiths has all the instincts of an activist. She is a voice to the voiceless. Indigenous peoples struggling to maintain their fragile yet highly sophisticated life-ways in the face of indifference and exploitation by European explorers and missionaries, or callous commerce and national governments. Jay listens to peoples' stories, experiences their pain and shares their rage. So often, powerless to change their circumstances, we meet people with astonishing dignity, generosity and wisdom; people who put so-called `civilization' to shame, revealing its inherent barbarism.

I did not want this remarkable book to end, its sheer celebration of freedom and everything wild is liberating in itself. This review does not begin to do it justice; I hope, however, that by reading it you will.

Challenging
A very interesting read. Part travel, part historical, part ecological and part political, Wild challenges many western preconceptions of the wild places of the world. I found that reading this book explained the joy that can be felt in wilderness areas, and the anger that is also felt when they are abused. Excellent and thought provoking.