Life is not linear - Rated 
I love this book. It is full of interest and takes a good look at the world from a perspective of the indigenous populations. I have never read anything like it.
It has a lot of interesting detail on the traditional beliefs and practices of peoples and the baleful impact that civilisation has brought to bear on their lives.
The ideas are fresh and welcome. The book deserves to be read slowly and savoured.
It is the very thing to read on the Tube on a Monday morning to set you up for a week of disgruntlement about what our lives have become, all in the name of progress.
After the fire... - Rated 
This book does generally live up to its reviews. It is instinctive, visceral, and beautiful. It is also wild in every sense. It is a mix of travel writing, nature writing, anthropology, and nature philosophy. Her explorations are thoroughly hands-on and heartfelt, and i particularly like the way she shows how western religious attitudes are so damaging to the natural environment and indigenous people. Because she is so open and honest about her travels and encounters, and so vocal about her beliefs, it is not surprising that many people have commented on the feeling of activism that runs through the book.
Her style of writing is a mix of eloquence and honesty, and it can be very seductive. But it is not without its problems. Her political invective can sometimes feel a little over-done and personal. There are also frequent disparities between the language she uses and the ideologies she espouses. At one turn she will talk of nature as a dispassionate and unfeeling entity, and in the next sentence will extol the thinking and speaking powers of nature in flights of pathetic fallacy that go beyond the empathic points she makes. This made me lose trust in her convictions a little, and made me suspicious of her passion, because it sometimes gets used to hide her theoretical inadequacies. My last criticism would be that the issues she highlights with such alacrity in the first chapter, are basically repeated in the following chapters with a different natural element and location as the metophorical back-beat to her musings.
Despite all this, it is an enjoyable read, with some very valid points to make about nature, wildness, and environment. It should be treated with a little caution however, as once you have recovered from her salvos of passionate indignation, you are often left with a smouldering wreckage of problematic language and ideas.
easily the best book of the year (so far) - Rated
Jay Griffiths has written the most wonderful book. It is too late and I am too tired to do it justice right now - but I just want to urge everyone to buy at least two copies - you might as well get 3 if it gives you free postage. Why? Because once you have read it you will want to give it to your friends - but you won't want to part with your copy - so this just saves you the bother of re-ordering it.
Wild is like the most sumptuous pudding - a rich pudding - one that is so daring that it takes you to the brink of being just too much - but never steps over the line ... just eat it in manageable portions - treat yourself, allow it to digest and you will get so much more.
Enjoy - share - and come away changed.
a wonder of a book - Rated
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 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 - Rated
`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 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.
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