Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I lost most of my respect for Oprah Winfrey years ago, but I was thrilled two years ago when I learned that she was starting up her "Book Club" again. I haven't read all of the books she's picked over the years, but the ones I have I've very much enjoyed, and she's brought a lot of attention to some contemporary authors I respect and admire. When I learned that Cheryl Strayed's "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," Winfrey's first pick for her "Book Club 2.0," was being made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, it moved quickly to the top of my reading list. I'm not going to abandon my faith in Winfrey's literary tastes over one lousy selection, but it's fair to say that "Wild" represents everything I loathe about the Cult of Oprah, full of a feel-good narcissistic spirituality in which genuine introspection is sacrificed on the altar of self-esteem. "Wild" isn't content merely to inspire its readers to adopt Strayed's entitled brand of faux empowerment, however - this book could get someone killed one of these days. When Strayed was 22, her mother was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. A few weeks later, she was dead: so begins "Wild." They'd been close, and I accept that grief does strange things to people, but Strayed uses the loss of her mother to justify giving in to every self-destructive hedonistic impulse that crosses her mind over the next four years. (I've known people who lost a *child* and fell apart less.) She compulsively sneaks around behind the back of her kind, devoted husband. Even after she confesses her affairs, he remains loving and supportive, and she still loves him but decides to go through with a divorce anyway because, I dunno, *reasons*. She flirts lightly with heroin addiction (is that even possible?) and gets knocked up by a junkie. When the pregnancy test comes out positive, Strayed realizes she's come to a turning point in her life: "I was crying . . . 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. I had to change . . . back to the person I used to be - strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good." So, of course, she makes an appointment with a psychiatrist, spends some time in rehab, buys a sturdy crib secondhand, and starts knitting little caps and booties. Just kidding! She doesn't do any of that stuff. Instead, she decides the solution to all her problems is to spend three months backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail in California. She doesn't know the terrain at all, and she's literally never been backpacking in her life, but she browsed a guidebook once when she was standing in line, and she's a pretty outdoorsy person, so she figures she can hold her own on an endeavor plenty of experienced backpackers wouldn't attempt without at least a year or so of directed preparation and training. She buys the guidebook and reads it "a dozen times" in the months leading up to the trip (although when she actually gets out on the trail, she realizes there were "things I'd overlooked"). She goes to REI and buys a backpack and a pair of hiking boots and a tent and other equipment. And then there's the *really* necessary stuff: in a sentence that only truly rabid pro-abortion types seem to be able to read without cringing at least a little bit, she informs us, "I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink." The reader might be excused for thinking, by the time Strayed arrives in the Mojave Desert to start her journey north, that she's actually taking the rigors and risks of this wilderness trek seriously. Then we learn of all the ways she *didn't* prepare. It turns out that at no point in the last few months did she bother to try out her equipment on a shorter excursion, even an overnight trip. In fact, it's in the hotel room where she spends the night before heading out on the trail that she packs her supplies into her backpack for the first time. She's brought two books for pleasure reading, a fancy camera, a foldable saw even she doesn't know what she's supposed to do with, and (of course) a pack of condoms, but it's not until she has all these packed safely away that she remembers, as a literal afterthought, that it would be a good idea to carry some *water*, too. (Did I mention she was in the Mojave *Desert*? In June, no less.) Finally, she's ready to go - and she's absolutely *stunned* to discover that her backpack is *heavy*! and unwieldy! and uncomfortable! I'd feel a sort of grudging respect that she decided to head out on her three-month trek even after she started to realize how hard it would actually be, if I weren't too busy marveling at her supreme idiocy. At the time of this writing, this book is the #1 seller in Amazon's "Hiking & Camping Excursion Guides" category. I cringe to think someone might actually buy this book expecting to learn about the Pacific Crest Trail. I cringe even more to think that there are going to be Oprah-cultists and young "feminist and artsy and political" types who find this book (or the film adaptation) inspiring and decide to head out on the trail themselves. Several experienced backpackers, including PCT thru-hikers, have questioned the veracity of Strayed's account, but even if every word is true, what she did was dangerously reckless. Even readers with the sense not to follow Strayed's example, however, should steer clear of this book if they're actually interested in the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed has plenty to say about the small towns and "resorts" she passed through on the way to pick up supplies, and she recounts the discomforts of the trail in exquisite, sometimes gruesome, detail - but the beauty of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Ranges are rarely given more than a general mention in passing. Strayed's favorite subject is herself, and not in a good way. She wrings every drop of insight out of her grief, her fatigue, her memories, her trailworn body, and then she goes back for more. This kind of self-absorption is a little immature, but not unpardonably so, in a woman of twenty-six, but Strayed wrote "Wild" more than fifteen years after her journey on the PCT, and she still seems to believe she's living the most important life that anyone's ever lived. (So do we all, perhaps, deep down, even if we know better, but most of us don't expect the rest of the world to agree.) It seems that everyone Strayed meets on the trail is immediately taken with her and wishes to bend over backwards to make her life easier, and she accepts this basically as her due. Those few individuals who don't fall under her spell - the camp hosts who (because it's their job) insist that she pay for the use of a space in their campground (like everyone else staying there), a hippie she speaks to for five minutes who has the audacity not to recognize her when they cross paths again a few days later - are beneath contempt. Nearly every man she meets wants to have sex with her, even when she hasn't bathed or changed her clothes in a week. It takes several weeks before the trail humbles her enough to admit to experienced backpackers that she doesn't know what she's doing and could use their expertise. I might give Strayed credit at least for unflinching honesty in self-examination, but I'm not sure she's being honest about her faults so much as she is simply unaware that they're faults at all, just as it never seems to occur to her we might not actually care to (or might even actually care not to) read about "the coarse hair on [her] pudenda." (What kind of feminist uses the term "pudenda" anyway?) I couldn't help feeling as I read that Strayed left gratuitous destruction in her wake everywhere she went. Her marriage, her unborn offspring, the tired old horse her mother had loved (but which she couldn't be bothered to find a veterinarian to euthanize properly) - all are burdens to be shucked aside lightly at Strayed's convenience. Particularly wrenching to my bibliophilic heart was the way Strayed lightens her literal load by burning the books she read on the trail. She claims that, as a book-lover herself, she hates having to do it - but she certainly gets used to it quickly. There were several occasions when she could easily have given a book away, or even left it for another hiker to find (maybe it would be ruined by exposure to the elements before someone happened along, but there's at least a chance it wouldn't), but didn't. So eager was she to lighten her load that she burned her copy of "Staying Found: The Complete Map and Compass Handbook" without having actually mastered the use of map and compass. The only book she carried all the way from the Mojave Desert to the Washington border was one she actually opened only twice the whole three months she was on the trail, because it was a longtime favorite and she had it practically memorized. She admits she had no reason not to burn that one too, but she didn't, because, I dunno, *reasons*, dammit! In the back of the book, after the Acknowledgements, Strayed includes a list titled "Books Burned on the PCT" - not "Books Read on the PCT," which would have been more accurate since it includes the one book she carried all the way and one that she traded for another book (which she did burn). It's almost as if she's proud of having consigned Faulkner, Nabokov, and Joyce to the flames. So casually does Strayed admit to destroying so much that is beautiful, I'm shocked she actually managed to hike over a thousand miles without starting a forest fire. Fifteen years after her summer on the PCT, she went back to the place where her journey ended, with her second husband and their children, and it was "only then that the meaning of my hike would unfold inside of me, the secret I'd always told myself finally revealed." Surely she means to share this secret with us, who have vicariously made the journey with her for 300 pages? But . . . no. Instead, she tells us that on the day she finished her trip, all she knew was "the fact that I didn't have to know" what it all meant, that "it was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was . . . ." Apparently, that should be enough for her readers, too. Oh well, at least I don't have to go on a three-month hike of my own now to understand that if I did, it would *mean something*, even if I couldn't tell you precisely what. All of this is really too bad, because "Wild" could have been an amazing book. I can't honestly say that I didn't enjoy the time I spent reading it. It's a well-paced, entertaining narrative about a remarkable experience. Strayed can actually write, too, at least when she's actually writing instead of showing off to the reader how well she can write. Unfortunately, there was just so much about this book that was upsetting and offensive and pretentious and ridiculous that it was hard to tell how much of my pleasure in this book came from enjoying it, and how much from the perverse, guilty thrill of loathing the woman who wrote it.