Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Unabridged)
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4.3 • 435 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection.
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Listening to Cheryl Strayed’s account of her life-changing, 1,100-mile trek is an awe-inspiring and uplifting experience. Strayed was 26 when the cumulative strain of her mother’s death, failed marriage, and struggles with substance abuse led to one of the most important decisions of her life: to embark on a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which traverses the western U.S. from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Strayed describes her journey in such vivid detail that we can basically feel the unrelenting Mojave Desert sun and smell the crisp mountain air, but it’s her internal reflections that make Wild such a transformative listen. Bernadette Dunne narrates the book with the same nuance and gravitas she brought to memoirs by Sandra Day O’Connor and Katharine Hepburn, perfectly capturing Strayed’s adventurous spirit, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that Strayed had never worn a pair of hiking boots before her ambitious trip. Wild inspired a splashy movie adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon—and the audiobook is not to be missed.
Customer Reviews
Too close to comfort
I bought this audiobook last summer & forgot about it. At the end of the summer I moved to WA & I finally started listening without paying much attention to the setting. I very quickly noted how much Cheryl & I have in common during our 20’s (minus 2 very important details). It was both inspiring, motivating & painful to listen to this book in such a difficult part of my life. 10/10 if you need that push for yourself for greatness/growth.
Get ready to get lost (and inspired!) in this book
I’m 33. My mom has terminal cancer. I saw the preview for the movie and had it on the list to see it but hadn’t. I had an upcoming road trip for business and decided to download this. Wow. I cried, I laughed, I literally couldn’t wait to start the book again after I was done with business meetings and I have never had a more quick drive on this particular stretch of road. Actively searching for my adventure to rebuild me again after we get passed this season of my mom passing. If you’re on the fence about reading this, hit “purchase”, I promise you won’t regret.
More than bargained for.
I purchase this audiobook because I wanted to hear a great hiking story. I sympathized with her dealing with her mothers death and understand the importance of weaving this throughout her journey. I found the details of the hike quite enjoyable but her details of cheating and constantly going into detail about her attraction to men and her sexual escapades to be a bit much at times and would have been fine without that information. The part I was most unthrilled- well blatantly bothered.. to say the least .. was the part about killing her horse. There were parts of the book she went into very little detail about which I would have liked more of and parts where it was way over detailed. The killing of the horse should have come with a trigger warning it was just so terrible and a awful thing to hear about and I just don’t see the relevance of it to the story in the least. Being that she mentions no end to the other horse so I imagine it’s still alone in a stable in the middle of nowhere watching the - I think it was coyotes - eating the corpse of her childhood horse. Very gruesome. If you listen to this audiobook skip the horse part it’s just terrible.
I wanna recommend this to an extent but it’s not the best hiking book I read or top 5.
Ultimately skip the horse part of the audiobook.