Wild: An Elemental Journey [Import] [Paperback]

Jay Griffiths (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (May 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141006447
• ISBN-13: 978-0141006444
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #340,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, dramatic, moving, March 4, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hardcover)

You might think WILD would be about wildlife, but it's not - it's a blend of true adventure and travelogue which follows the author's journeys into the world's wildest places and his encounters with the peoples who inhabit them, from the Amazon to the Arctic. It's also a personal journey as Griffiths struggles with his own depression and loss - and as such comes from a visitor who is not your typical adventure traveler, but a cultural investigator. Fascinating, dramatic, moving - and packed with insights on the changing wild places of the Earth.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonder of a book, February 27, 2008

By 

David Abram - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hardcover)

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 and creatures as they weather the insanity of contemporary civilization. Yet it's written with abundant empathy for the human animal, too, in its instinctive eloquence and its 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 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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Into the Wild In Search of Self, August 15, 2010

By 

Bugs "Patrick" (Los Angeles, Ca.) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hardcover)

Jay Griffiths took a seven year wild tour of many lands to visit indigenous people in search of self and to immerse herself in their cultures for a hands-on education with people who have lived with nature for eons. The tragedy of the indigenous peoples clash with modern/materialistic/consumer societies is quite evident and there is a loud call for western societies to leave the natives and their lands to their un-molested selves.

Griffiths starts her 7 year journey in Peru to accompany an anthropologist on a visit to an Amazonian shaman where she imbibes on the powerful hallucinogen ayahuasca for a mind/body/spiritual awakening. This experience sets the stage for many more such wild encounters with indigenous tribes around the world and makes for an engrossing, wild read!

Griffiths' writing style is funny, mad, intense, saucy, but most of all, serious. After her travels, she comes away with: "My feelings now, personal and political, run to savage love, and savage rage". "It is a rage against the cruelties committed for the sake of this bland consumer culture. A rage against the effects of factory farming...". "A rage against out-of-town shopping centers, placed on the last little chinks of commons...". "A rage against the hollow men, the stuffed shirts who are the agents of the wasteland...". "There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose."- Pages 7 to 8. Griffiths relates the dire situation in Indonesia where the West Papuans and their traditional lands are under siege by the repressive government and need help in maintaining their independence.

In a nutshell, "Wild" is a clear and tragic comparison of the natural, native, sustainable world and the "devouring", expansionist wasteland of the consumerist societies- a potent tale of discovery of the natural world, self and culture clashes!