WILD: FROM LOST TO FIND ON THE PACIFIC COAST TRAIL, BY CHERYL STRAYED
Book Discussion date and time: Tuesday, July 22, 2014 at 11:00 AM.
The inspiring memoir of a young woman who, reeling from personal catastrophe, set out alone to hike over a thousand miles from the Mohave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. (An Oprah's Book Club pick.)
/* Starred Review */ In the summer of 1995, at age 26
and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike
solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching
from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain
ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment,
she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months.
Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed
was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother
from cancer; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused time “like a
crackling Fourth of July sparkler.” Hiking the trail helped decide what
direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked
or carried a pack before. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack
she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to
perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour.
Eventually she began to experience “a kind of strange, abstract,
retrospective fun,” meeting the few other hikers along the way, all
male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she
had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature
from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial
by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed,
a lone survivor. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
Agency. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed January 2, 2012) (Publishers Weekly,
vol 259, issue 01, p)
Library Journal:
Strayed delves into memoir after her fiction debut,
Torch . She here recounts her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail
(PCT) in 1995 after her mother's death and her own subsequent divorce.
Designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968 but not completed until 1993,
the PCT runs from Mexico to Canada, and Strayed hiked sections of it
two summers after it was officially declared finished. She takes readers
with her on the trail, and the transformation she experiences on its
course is significant: she goes from feeling out of her element with a
too-big backpack and too-small boots to finding a sense of home in the
wilderness and with the allies she meets along the way. Readers will
appreciate her vivid descriptions of the natural wonders near the PCT,
particularly Mount Hood, Crater Lake, and the Sierras—what John Muir
proclaimed the "Range of Light." VERDICT This book is less about the
PCT and more about Strayed's own personal journey, which makes the
story's scope a bit unclear. However, fans of her novel will likely
enjoy this new book. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/11.]— Karen McCoy, Northern
Arizona Univ. Lib., Flagstaff --Karen McCoy (Reviewed February 15,
2012) (Library Journal, vol 137, issue 03, p119)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ Unsentimental memoir of the
author's three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the
Pacific Crest Trail. Following the death of her mother, Strayed's
(Torch, 2006) life quickly disintegrated. Family ties melted away; she
divorced her husband and slipped into drug use. For the next four years
life was a series of disappointments. "I was crying over all of it," she
writes, "over the sick mire I'd made of my life since my mother died;
over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be
this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly." While waiting in line at
an outdoors store, Strayed read the back cover of a book about the
Pacific Crest Trail. Initially, the idea of hiking the trail became a
vague apparition, then a goal. Woefully underprepared for the
wilderness, out of shape and carrying a ridiculously overweight pack,
the author set out from the small California town of Mojave, toward a
bridge ("the Bridge of the Gods") crossing the Columbia River at the
Oregon-Washington border. Strayed's writing admirably conveys the rigors
and rewards of long-distance hiking. Along the way she suffered aches,
pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the
author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT
was "powerful and fundamental" and "truly hard and glorious." Strayed
was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her. Most of
the hikers she met along the way were helpful, and she also encountered
instances of trail magic, "the unexpected and sweet happenings that
stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail." A candid,
inspiring narrative of the author's brutal physical and psychological
journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of
self.(Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2012)
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