Customer Reviews

Wild: An Elemental Journey

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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.

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.

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!

Having just finished reading "Wild: An Elemental Journey" by our associate Jay Griffiths, we at Bracketpress are for once lost for words ... and as so many express our feelings more articulately we offer the following ...

"A major book by a major writer...powerful and uncompromising... she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn't there she simply births it... a majestic anthropology" - Bill McKibben, The Ecologist

"I used to think the wild did not have words, that it lay beyond the edge of logic and expression. With her journey and her struggle, Jay Griffiths proves me wrong...Her words are intense, episodic, gripping, and sensual, somewhere between Edward Abbey and Jeanette Winterson-who knew there was such a place? Wild is the first great nature writing of the 21st century." - David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing and Wild Ideas.

"Insightful, effervescent and lavishly written...She shrouds her amazingly strenuous physical journey with a rich literary penumbra. The book has a profusion of historical allusions and a fertile bibliography; the vivid, excited writing draws haunting, lovely connections among multiple cultures, landscapes and ideas." - Ruth Padel, The Washington Post.

"Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths' remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind.

"Like Thoreau, Jay Griffiths wants to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life....an immersionist... [her] research is impressive... [her] writing dexterous and lush... a passionate plea for the preservation of wilderness." - New York Times
"Wholly original...Griffiths's project is wildness itself, in all the philosophical glory that the 'sublime' held for the Romantics... Griffiths is fascinated by, and fascinating on, wild language, and her writing builds in extraordinary poetic sequences.... Indeed, of the many literary elements that make up the book - travelogue, memoir, journal, reportage, extended essay on feminism, sociology, anthropology, religion, ecology and geopolitics - it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work. Perhaps its most remarkable achievement is its own quality of wildness. Wild is alive with its subject. Language is thrown around in the most earthy, vital way... A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life wherever it is found, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work. - Ian Beetlestone, The Observer
"An exuberant and erudite exploration of the meaning of wilderness and its place in our lives... Griffiths' love for words and her skill in using them, her easy familiarity with a host of poets, novelists, naturalists and anthropologists...her willingness to reveal so much of herself, make this a fascinating journey." - Kirkus Reviews

"A book of staggering power, honesty and wit" - BBC Wildlife Magazine.

"Jay Griffiths brings fierce conviction and impressive scholarship to her work... great erudition and a real sensitivity to language... a gifted writer." - Publishers Weekly

Jay Griffiths may be our most important yet-to-be-discovered author. Her "Wild: An Elemental Journey" and "A Sideways Look at Time" are two of the seminal books of our time. Both books are profound commentaries on Western culture, and the boxed and bridled ways we live.

But there's way more here than just the message. The music of her writing is beguiling. Her exuberant word-play is to me the literary equivalent of jazz. She is like the Charlie Parker of the English language.

- Paul Winter

Wild: An Elemental Journey is an exceptionally brilliant work by Jay Griffiths.

I wanted to recommend a book I think is extraordinary. The author is Jay Griffiths and the book is "Wild, An Elemental Journey". She uses language like fireworks, exploding words into a delightful yet passionate illumination of human experiences, exploring the world's indigenous people with the beauty of a particularly tender and insightful mind. My deepest admiration to this amazing work.

Totally unique in voice and content, Jay Griffiths' Wild: An Elemental Journey, is a rich wilderness of provocative images and ideas. She takes the reader on a journey of wild places and wild elements, weaving together historical fact with poetic wonder. This book honors the feminine voice--the writers own--as well as the voice of the Earth. At times she sings to us; at times she screams. But she does not waver in her assertions of the crimes we humans--Europeans and Americans, especially--have committed against our land and our people and how off course we have gotten from our own wild natures.

At times sobering, at other times hilariously irreverent, Wild is not a book for everyone. But I would argue that it is a book for anyone who is willing to have their perceptions challenged and their psychic laundry aired out on a cold, blustery spring day. The book is both alarming and refreshing.

Jay Griffiths is a "shaman/fool" who gives her readers permission to join her in the sacred cause.

Overwritten, overwrought, overdone and, judging by the reviews here, overpraised. Easily the worst book of the fifty or so I have read in the last year. I gave it away to charity, rather than run the risk that the awfulness of this book would seep from between its covers and affect nearby books I knew to be good.