Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40984 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

Waking the wild woman
This is a breathtaking book that changed my perspective on the way I view the wild people and places of the world as well as my own internal landscape. Jay is a compelling advocate of the need to protect wildness in our world. I agree that we are in great danger of becoming homogenised to certain dominant politics, philosophies and religions. We lose thousands of years worth of art, knowledge and understanding when we diminish, colonise and plunder our wild people and places .The loss is of great detriment not only to those minorities' health and wellbeing (often for generations), nor simply yet more environmental damage, but also the whole of humanity is impoverished. It challenged my own egocentric views and made me review my values and beliefs. However what really stunned me was the authentic and holistic style with which she writes, one moment all highly researched intellect, the next political jibe, another moment sensual, sexual poetry, and yet another moment hugely personal, physical experience. It is like being inside a woman's brain. Made me search for a more authentic voice for myself as well as valuing people and places I knew liitle about. Essential reading.

Really enjoyable and moving.
Thoroughly enoyed this book, and found the stories of disenfranchised peoples very moving. It made me look further into some of the issues raised. One criticism is that during her discussion on nomadic traditions, the writer describes British laws and acts of parliament concerning vagrants, beggars which have been in place since the 15th and 16th centuries. Scotland was still independant until 1707, so Britain did not exist at that time. Considering the author spends most of the book exposing the colonialist atrocities of the British Empire and others, this was a significant inaccuracy.

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.