Junger makes an effort to frame their project—'a 300-mile conversation about war' and why it’s so hard to come home—which is more or less what happens in the film. That’s not what happens in the book. Here, we pass through countryside, nearly all of it in south-central Pennsylvania, and don’t hear a word from anyone till the second half. Freedom has a different purpose, a frame far less explicit ... virtually nothing happens outside the author’s head ... But the cleansing march disappears entirely for most of this short book. Junger takes us on long detours through history, anthropology, primatology, boxing, poker. It’s not easy to follow the thread ... Freedom has an authority problem. That is, its own authority is undercut by breathtaking generalizations and improbable mind-readings ... These contentions read like wild guesses or sentimental projections, and they reflect the book’s structure, which feels both aimless and overdetermined. An afterword of sources and references lists a great many books and interviews, but it comes too late to solve the authority problem.

... an odd, rambling book that doesn't really arrive at a conclusion, and at times seems unsure what questions it's asking in the first place ... The juxtaposition of memoir and Junger's peregrinations is meant, it seems, to provide a framework by which we might understand the concept of freedom better. The results aren't great ... filled with jarring transitions, culminating in a bizarre hypothetical question. It's difficult to follow Junger's train of thought; the effect is like listening to a lecturer who has forgotten his notes to a TED Talk and is clearly just winging it ... The rest of the book plays out much the same way, with Junger discussing a variety of subjects at variable length, cutting back to the story of his walk with his acquaintances (whom Junger never names or describes much at all), then back to more random topics, most of which are hypermasculine in nature ... Much of Freedom is inflected with a kind of tough-guy bravado ... Junger does make some solid observations along the way...But many of his assertions are, to put it mildly, bizarre ... an inexplicable book until the last page, when Junger discloses a personal circumstance—his first really human moment of the book—that illuminates, obliquely, why he set off on his voyage in the first place. It's disarming, and it only lasts an instant, but it suggests what this book could have been had he approached it with even a slight sense of vulnerability ... But that's not the book he wrote. What Junger has given us is unfocused, half-baked, a non-answer in search of a non-question.

Journalist and filmmaker Junger returns to the fertile ground of male camaraderie and the pushing of limits ... The setting is conducive to ruminations on the concept of freedom, and, with muscular prose and vivid, poetic descriptions, Junger both conjures the trek and ponders the nomadic lifestyle, Genghis Khan, Daniel Boone, fugitive slaves, the Seminole Indians, boxers, and the Gini coefficient.

The narrative spine of the book is Junger’s progress along the route, in whose course he gives us richly detailed descriptions of landscape, camp sites, railroad infrastructure, and rumbling freight trains ... Of psychological freedom, the kind of inner freedom that religious mystics pursue in their quest for union with the divine, or that artists experience when immersed in their craft, or that athletes often experience when mind and body fuse—Junger has nothing to say. It’s not a dimension of freedom that seems to interest him, though for some seekers it is the highest form of freedom because it allows you to be free even if you are in prison ... Junger writes in a blunt, tough, manly style that conjures Hemingway ... This is a book for men who are drawn to an outdoor experience that is difficult, occasionally dangerous, and existentially pointless. Junger acknowledges that his trek is largely a gesture, perhaps merely a stunt.

Each part is engaging, entertaining, and enlightening. But the whole doesn’t offer a coherent experience: It’s more like three disconnected rambles than a single trip to a fixed destination ... Junger is best known for his multi-year New York Times bestseller, The Perfect Storm, which was turned into a blockbuster movie of the same name. Critics likened him to Ernest Hemingway after that early triumph, and the comparison is warranted. His prose offers the same nervous constraint, the same explosive calm ... As with Hemingway’s style, Junger’s distinctive voice might, in the mischievous mind, inspire parody alongside admiration ... The saga ends enigmatically, with an anticlimactic failure to achieve a desired goal. But that failure perhaps provides a further insight into the nature of freedom — and an argument for the book’s disjointed structure. Acceptance of the random nature of our existence may be what truly sets us free.

Junger has forged an estimable literary career telling the stories of people in extreme circumstances. His latest...offers a thoughtful, but generally less compelling, experience ... Junger turns away from the details of the trek to touch on a diverse collection of topics that include fragments of Native American history, the building of the 140,000 miles of the American railroad system, Chicago street gangs, Ireland’s Easter Rising in May 2016, and even something called the 'Gini coefficient,' a measure of economic equality. Most of these subjects are inherently interesting, some even fascinating, but they seem to call for deeper treatment than he chooses to afford them in these pieces ... His odyssey produces some insightful moments, but this account feels more like a set of sketches than a fully satisfying treatment of its subject. At the midpoint of his accomplished career, one hopes that someday Junger will choose to revisit it in a more expansive form.

... a rambling reflection on the nature of freedom, grounded in a 400-mile ... His account of their travails is interspersed with philosophical musings, lyrical nature writing, and observations about war, human endurance, and the settling of the American frontier ... It’s a mixed bag—insights into how the Apaches and the Taliban overcame numerically superior forces brush up against random facts and statistics...Ultimately, the journey’s lack of purpose mirrors the book’s lack of focus. The result feels more self-indulgent than illuminating.