Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Waking the wild woman June 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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. May 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 May 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Wild freedom, deep wisdom April 30, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
`Wild' is a breathtaking masterpiece. It balances passion and energy with precise meticulous reflection and expression. It has the sweep of a great symphony with the subtlety of intricate craftsmanship.
`Wild' is the work of an artist. It takes as its pallet the four ancient elements, plus two, and explores the surface of the earth and its indigenous peoples in all its primal and feral reality and beauty. From the Amazon (earth) to the Arctic (ice), from the Sea Gypsies (water) to the Australian aborigines (fire) and the mountain peoples of West Papua (air); with a final moving personal meditation on the `wild mind.'
Jay Griffiths is intoxicated with the love and experience of freedom; she takes that deep archetypal sense of `wildness' and the longing `to be wild' and expresses it perfectly, profoundly and astonishingly. Her prose is sheer poetry. Whether reflecting on the exquisite culture that is woven into the very texture of the rainforest, or upon an understanding of `the kindness of the wilderness', the language, the ideas and the emotions are at times overwhelming. Jay loves words; their sounds, their connections and their meanings. Each word has precision, each sentence balanced and shaped to perfection; sometimes to draw out a deeply hidden treasure, most of the time simply to inspire us to dance with abandon. I shall be quoting whole paragraphs for years to come.
`Wild' is no travelogue, but rather the journal of a deeply personal journey to places described variously as `desolate', `nothingness' and `wasteland' and to meet people dismissed as `primitive' or `savages'. What Jay Griffiths reveals is that words like these tell us everything about the observer and nothing about what they claim to see. Vast expanses of land, water or ice are alive with vibrant contours and pulsating `songlines', voiced by their original peoples, have a presence and stories beyond imagining. Jay's thinking is profound and reflective, her insights and observations draw on wide reading around her subject (the bibliography is worth the price of the book alone).
Jay Griffiths has all the instincts of an activist. She is a voice to the voiceless. Indigenous peoples struggling to maintain their fragile yet highly sophisticated life-ways in the face of indifference and exploitation by European explorers and missionaries, or callous commerce and national governments. Jay listens to peoples' stories, experiences their pain and shares their rage. So often, powerless to change their circumstances, we meet people with astonishing dignity, generosity and wisdom; people who put so-called `civilization' to shame, revealing its inherent barbarism.
I did not want this remarkable book to end, its sheer celebration of freedom and everything wild is liberating in itself. This review does not begin to do it justice; I hope, however, that by reading it you will.
Challenging April 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A very interesting read. Part travel, part historical, part ecological and part political, Wild challenges many western preconceptions of the wild places of the world. I found that reading this book explained the joy that can be felt in wilderness areas, and the anger that is also felt when they are abused. Excellent and thought provoking.
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