Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester in 1965. She is the author of Pip Pip, Wild, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon and Kith. She won the Orion Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA. She has also been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the World Book Day award. Jay is a contributor to various publications and platforms including the Guardian, London Review of Books and the Radiolab podcast. Her memoir Tristimania will be published by Hamish Hamilton in May 2016.
Wild is like nothing else I've ever read: thrilling, troubling,
frightening, exhilarating. Jay Griffiths' courage and energy are
formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and literary flair
*Phillip Pullman*
Reality is such that both language and imagination have to
exaggerate in order to confront it truly. Living with such
exaggeration you need a very good head for heights and a lot of
bravery. In this book Jay Griffiths has both. If bravery itself
could write (by definition it can't), it would write, I believe,
like she does
*John Berger*
A vivifying read in its entirety . . . both an act of revolt
(against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the
soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for
landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable
and staggering as love.) . . . Reclaiming our wildness emerges as
an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption
by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for
being . . . What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this
near-living, a spell against apathy, against our self-expatriation
from our own nature
*The Marginalian*
Wild is like nothing else I've ever read: thrilling,
troubling, frightening, exhilarating. Jay Griffiths' courage and
energy are formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and
literary flair * Philip Pullman *
Reality is such that both language and imagination have to
exaggerate in order to confront it truly. Living with such
exaggeration you need a very good head for heights and a lot of
bravery. In this book Jay Griffiths has both. If bravery itself
could write (by definition it can't), it would write, I believe,
like she does * John Berger *
In her second book (after A Sideways Look at Time) Griffiths narrates her seven-year exploration of the wildest places left on the globe-the Amazon rain forest, the Arctic and New Guinea, among others. The book is divided into five sections representing the "elements": earth, ice, water, fire and air. Her search for what remains wild is as much a linguistic and spiritual journey as it is a physical one, although she does take real risks, like drinking psychedelic ayahuasca infusions with shamans deep in the jungle. Griffiths's central thesis-that by developing and destroying our last wildernesses we are impoverishing our lives-is not an original one, but she brings fierce conviction and impressive scholarship to her work. Although Griffiths has great erudition and a real sensitivity to language, her ultraromantic perspective, in which civilization is always bad and nature always idyllic, lacks nuance. For someone so inspired by nature, Griffiths doesn't allow her observations to speak for themselves; instead, every event becomes another opportunity to condemn modern man. The lack of a narrative arc makes the book a collection of variations on a theme, and although Griffiths is a gifted writer, after 60 such essays, the mind starts to wander. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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