PositiveThe Wall Street JournalWild is Ms. Strayed\'s vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life unraveling and of the journey that put it back together ... In Wild, she is candid about her anger at her mother for dying, her infidelities during her marriage and her slide into heroin use. But the darkness is relieved by self-deprecating humor as she chronicles her clueless hiking expedition and the rebirth it helped to inspire ... Wild easily transcends the hiking genre, though it presents plenty of details about equipment ordeals and physical challenges. Anyone with some backpacking experience will find Ms. Strayed\'s chronicle especially amusing ... Ms. Strayed is honest about the tedium of hiking but also alert to the self-discovery that can be stirred by solitude and self-reliance ... Pathos and humor are her main companions on the trail, although she writes vividly about the cast of other pilgrims that she encounters.
