Product Description

I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13043 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 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

Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald (Books of the Year)
'The best book I read all year was Wild by Jay Griffiths'

Robert MacFarlane
`Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths' remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject'

Customer Reviews

Overwritten - too much
I see why people are seduced by this, but a hundred pages or so in, I fled back to Hemingway. A hundred pages of images like 'clouds mulled on the horizon'. A hundred pages of drama and ecstacy, with many proliferating adjectives, and whole flights of those alienated verbs Macfarlane likes too. It was like a Plath poem written out in long lines, but those poems need the space around them to make thier impact. I know the author is trying to say something about nature, and about its wildness, but the extreme expressivity loses impact when repeated and repeated over and over and over. I felt bludgeoned. It felt immature and starstruck, like a girl's letter to a rock star - touching, but not wise. (And the stuff about menstruation is total rubbish.) All the same, a little pruning (yes, I know) would have made a very good book of this. The wild doesn't have to be a screaming harpy. It can be gentle, too.

Journeys to the wild corners of the world and the soul.
Not many of us will visit the places and talk to the people that Jay Griffiths has, and perhaps that's just as well. We accompany her on a seven year journey as she shows us how much damage has been done to the wild corners and cultures of our planet by the resource-hungry and the religious zealots of the 'civilized' world. From the chill of the Arctic, to the heat of the Australian outback, using language that takes you right to the heart of the wild and deep into the recesses of her own soul, she shows us the incredible beauty and savagery of the planet. Her descriptions are as extraordinarily vivid as the landscapes through which she travels. Poetic, alliterative, coarse, rhythmic, her words dance across the page like a verbal ballet. We are even given the etymology of some of her choices, to enrich her meaning. The last section of the book contains the most moving diary of grief I have ever read. This is an odyssey to delight and challenge both the mind and the soul. Both her books are etched in my memory.

Book of the year
Jay has produced one of the best books I have ever read - and I have read a lot. She combines a joyful playfulness of language with a passionate love of the natural world. She has created a manifesto for a new world - but she has done it so cleverly that you could mistake this book for an adventure story. There is great daring and sacrifice as she explores the Wild-est parts of the world - shamanic drug-induced hallucinations in the Amazon, shredded feet in West Papua and erotic loneliness in the heart of Australia make for a great romp. But they sugar a very powerful medicine that will seep into your bones - we have to change our view of the world, we have to accept that there is great value in the Wild. My only criticism of the book is that it ends.