Yearning Wild: Exploring the Last Frontier and the Landscape of the Heart [Hardcover]

R. Glendon Brunk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2001

In 1968, Glendon Brunk moved to Alaska to pursue his childhood dream of living in the wilds of the last American frontier. He built his own log cabin, hunted and fished, worked with the native Inuit, and became one of the world's top sled-dog racers. But he also watched the land he loved being destroyed by the tools of the very society he represented. Disgusted and distraught, Brunk left Alaska and hitchhiked across Africa, Asia, and North America, where he witnessed continuing destruction from the hands of humans. He returned to Alaska, committed to fight to save what is left of the wilderness. This personal story explores the deeply American contradictions that make up modern Alaska and questions our cultural inability to both love and protect the land.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This engaging memoir by a professor of creative writing and environmental studies at Prescott College tells the story of a young man growing up and a land becoming tamed. Brunk, who drove west the moment his high school graduation ceremony ended, eventually arrives in the wilds of Alaska in 1968. Newly married and ready to be a "real" man, he lives his "Jack London notion of life": hunting, fishing, building his own log cabin and beginning to race sled dogs. Over the next 12 years, Brunk becomes one of the world's top sled dog racers; he experiences fatherhood and later divorce. But after winning the world championship of sled dog racing in 1980, Brunk sells his dog team and leaves Alaska's shrinking wilderness behind, heeding a voice that "kept prodding, kept insisting that something else needed doing." The nomadic Brunk then embarks on a seven-year odyssey around Africa, South America and Asia. He thrives on the "open, reckless engagement with the world," spends his 40th birthday camped out in the Serengeti, "in love with life, with the myriad possibilities of it all," and eventually comes to embrace simplicity and challenge Western notions of success. Finally, largely in response to a plea from his daughter, Brunk decides to return to North America and "life without bears," and to commit himself to protecting the Alaskan wilderness he loves. Although occasionally unpolished, at its best Brunk's prose is direct and heartfelt. This is a stirring memoir from one man who heard the call of the wild and answered it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The essays repackaged here originated as invited lectures and introductions to reissued classics. Stocking (distinguished service professor emeritus, Univ. of Chicago) reflects on his career as a historian of ideas in an anthropology department. Through introductory comments, he accounts for his intellectual development, examines the thought processes behind his research agendas, and broods over his procrastination and abandoned projects. As in his previous collections (Race, Culture, and Evolution and The Ethnographer's Magic), his flair for writing microcosmic vignettes is evident. His major themes Franz Boas, British anthropology, and national traditions in anthropology have occupied him intermittently over the years, and his fixation on the historicism/presentism debate is a persistent underlying motif. Stocking focuses on pivotal individuals whom he sees as "observation towers from which to survey the surrounding intellectual territory and as beacons to illuminate the obscurities of the intervening ground." His writing is clear but extremely dense and theoretical, and his documentation is curiously basic for a historical analysis. While this study is probably beyond the grasp or interest of general readers wanting to learn about the history of anthropology, it nevertheless belongs in every academic library. Jay H. Bernstein, Fordham Univ., Bronx, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Invisible Cities Press Llc; 1 edition (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931229066
• ISBN-13: 978-1931229067
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,174,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yearning Wild: Exploring The Last Frontier and the Landscape, February 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Yearning Wild: Exploring the Last Frontier and the Landscape of the Heart (Paperback)

What an honest and brave guy to write this book. Glendon Brunk, one of those ultra-manly men, writes so honestly about what it means to be a man in a world dominated by men, and how, through the amalgamating forces of pain and growing self-awareness, came to see a different way. It's a book set in Alaska, with all the raw power of conquering the wilderness and living wild, with facing grizzly bears and extreme cold, but it's really not about Alaska. It's about growth and coming into consciousness. It's about driving sled dogs competively and coming to realize that winning the world championship of sled dog racing - a feat akin to any great athletic endeavor - was empty. It was because of a single-minded obsession to win, to conquer, to be the best, to control, all the manly perceptions that have the world in so much trouble today. Yearning Wild is about one man coming to see his responsibility for wounding, not only himself, but women and children and the land. It's about awakening. This book is a brave beginning, and it needs to be out there. I - a man - would encourage every man, every woman to buy it and to pass it on. Because it's one of those books that's desparately needed for the times we live in. Do it, please.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Davy Crockett Meets H. D. Thoreau, November 27, 2001

By 

Helen J. Harris "picky reader" (Alameda, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yearning Wild: Exploring the Last Frontier and the Landscape of the Heart (Hardcover)

Here's a book with the romanticism of Davy Crockett, weather the likes of A Perfect Storm, herds of caribou familiar through Never Cry Wolf, and a cast of sled dogs paling Lassie, Old Yeller, Sounder, and Where the Red Fern Grows.
It's a book for children because of the raw adventure: watch our protagonist shoot a bear that's about to knock down his cabin door and eat his baby daughter (and then watch him leave, tossing his wife butchering instructions). Hear him call "Trail" as he and his sixteen world champions pass the favored dog team and head into Fairbanks and the crowd's cheers.
It's a book for women because its central figure is the stuff of endless heartbreak: a doer, a pacifist, a romantic, a man with a guitar and songs and dreams as big as all outdoors, a man whose restlessness is the stuff (in women's eyes) of pathology. This man from Mars retreats not just to his cave; he moves to Fiji, to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Guatemala, Mexico, and Africa.
It's a book for men because this writer lived most men's dreams. Brunk's woods were not Thoreau-sized; his peace required the presence of Alaskan wildlife which had never before seen a human.
He yearned really wild, and, as Mary Renault says, "Longing performs all things." R. Glendon Brunk performed.
It almost killed him. The real gifts in this amazing book are Brunk's courageous candor in addressing the essential emptiness he found once he realized his dreams. He does not flinch in the face of his paradoxes: he admits, for example - acknowledging a tension that must exist among almost all men -- that having a child was not in his dream. But this is a healing book. The adventure stories are only preliminary to Brunk's more central journey here: the one inward and the one backwards: back to the courage it takes to stay.
Read this book. Give it to your husband, your son, your son's teacher, your ex-husband, your boss, your mailperson. This is a great book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Adventure Centered in the Last Frontier, February 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Yearning Wild: Exploring the Last Frontier and the Landscape of the Heart (Paperback)

Glendon's down-to-earth writing style and his epic adventure story make this book an addictive page turner. Included is everything from running world class dog teams across the icy tundra, to sipping Kava in the South Pacific. Read it for yourself and find out what draws a man to Alaska.