From Publishers Weekly
In her second book (after
A Sideways Look at Time) Griffiths narrates her seven-year exploration of the wildest places left on the globe—the Amazon rain forest, the Arctic and New Guinea, among others. The book is divided into five sections representing the "elements": earth, ice, water, fire and air. Her search for what remains wild is as much a linguistic and spiritual journey as it is a physical one, although she does take real risks, like drinking psychedelic ayahuasca infusions with shamans deep in the jungle. Griffiths's central thesis—that by developing and destroying our last wildernesses we are impoverishing our lives—is not an original one, but she brings fierce conviction and impressive scholarship to her work. Although Griffiths has great erudition and a real sensitivity to language, her ultraromantic perspective, in which civilization is always bad and nature always idyllic, lacks nuance. For someone so inspired by nature, Griffiths doesn't allow her observations to speak for themselves; instead, every event becomes another opportunity to condemn modern man. The lack of a narrative arc makes the book a collection of variations on a theme, and although Griffiths is a gifted writer, after 60 such essays, the mind starts to wander.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Praise for Jay Griffiths' Pip Pip:'This is smart, edgy work, from an original and exciting mind. Jay Griffiths' voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first-century debate' Barry Lopez 'Like the seminal socialist, feminist and ecological works, Pip Pip articulates what thousands have felt but no-one has been able to put into words . . . Cheeky, intelligent, always gripping, Pip Pip will be the opening salvo in a new battle over the human spirit' George Monbiot'Original and intuitive . . . amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited. Bravo!' TLS
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
