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| The Way Out: A True Story of Survival | 
| Author: Craig Childs
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $1.50
You Save: $22.45 (94%)
New (8) from $1.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 105202
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0316610666
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.9
EAN: 9780316610667
ASIN: 0316610666
Publication Date: January 7, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Excellent condition hardback with dust jacket; very clean; binding tight
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 7 | | NEXT » |
 Take stock of what has happened along your own walk! March 24, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Where most people go to resorts or on a cruise for time away from their everyday lives, Craig Childs and his close friend and traveling companion Dirk Vaughn walk the desolate deserts, canyons and chasms of the American West.
The Way Out describes Childs' walk through a forgotten and imposing fracture in the crust of the earth rarely if ever seen by white people. The indigenous tribes through millennia have passed this way, but until Childs and Vaughn receive permission from an elder Dine shepherd, no one has walked this route in recent times.
Childs' style of writing is metaphorical. It engages you and makes one understand the element he is traveling like no other author I have read. It flows like prose from the early days of the last century when authors painted their stories with words.
In the short period of time that the two men spend in their search through this chasm, they reflect on the lives they have led that have brought them to this adventure. Childs' life is one of dark memories that would have pushed those without his outlook upon life to the depths of depression. In his compatriot Vaughn, we meet a man that has seen the distasteful underbelly of big city crime in his days as a police officer.
Yet neither man allows those past experiences to dampen their spirit in their quest to explore the forgotten realm in which they have intentionally placed themselves.
I must admit, I almost put this book down. But as I forged forward I began to understand the author's style and what he was trying to communicate.
Armchair Interviews says: The Way Out will make you take solitary stock of what has happened along your own walk through life.
 Let's talk about real survival November 27, 2005
7 out of 34 found this review helpful
With all due respect (I find most of Craig's other books written with both elegance and restraint; amd his solo explorations acts of courage and surrender.), these two men went out for a month, with top-of-the-line gear, plenty of food (cached and otherwise) and, in fact, were in no real danger. A real survivor is a grandmother on food stamps, taking care of and loving five grand-kids, in a roach motel, with no vehicle and a greedy landlord.
Or a woman with a double mastectomy, who finds out she had bone cancer and decides it is time to learn how to drum because she has wanted to all her life, and knows each 3-month check-up might be her last.
 A gem. Childs delivers another masterpiece. September 3, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I loved this book, which is a feast for the soul. The novel profiles an inner and outer journey of two men through the most intense enviornment. Beyond the physical endurance required to pass this route, the 2 men reflect on their past struggles with socitenty, family and personal demons.
It's another incredible book by Childs, and I think marks a change in his writing style. Rather than a collection of journeys, this is a single story which becomes a lengend or tale.
Read this book. It reaches into the soul of men, in a way few contemporary stories can.
boring, boring , boring. April 30, 2005
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
I read this book based upon the reviews listed here and was very disappointed. What were these reviewers thinking? This book was tremendously boring. I never really got the feeling that they were in danger. Im sure they were but it didnt come across too well. And there were just too many metaphors. One after another. I never could identify with either hiker. I had no image in my mind of what they looked like. Too many flashbacks I didnt really care about their past experiences. If i wanted cop stories i would take out a cop book from the library(i dont buy books). This book cant compare to books like Into Thin Air and Skeletons across the Zahara. Please read either one. They were fantastic.
Life In The Stone March 21, 2005
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Craig Childs explores and describes the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau like no one else can. In "The Way Out", Childs and a friend navigate through a maze of canyons incised deeply into the Navajo Sandstone of northern Arizona. This could be just another wilderness adventure, a book to sit beside the countless other wilderness essays on bookstore shelves, but it is not: I have seen the land Craig Childs navigates in this book, a land of twisted canyons so disturbingly chaotic that I feel tremors in my solar plexus whenever I see it, and I have never had the courage to try to cross it.
As they struggle through the twisted canyons, Childs flashes back to his turbulent relationship with his father, and he describes his friend's long and torturous career as a police officer. At first I found these flashbacks to be too personal and intimate; I was almost embarrassed for Childs' inability to keep these deeply personal thoughts to himself. As their adventure progresses, though, these past experiences come alive in the stone, creating a web of life and continuum whose lessons are seen at every turn. In his final act, Childs takes his father's ashes into the desert where he intends to release them in the only place where he can find peace. A storm blows up though, and his father's ashes are taken by the wind and the crash of lightening. This seems to prove to him that his struggles through nature are the same as his struggles with his father: enigmatic; tempestuous; dichotomous.
"The Way Out" is a powerful story of emotion and survival in the wilderness of the land and of the mind.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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