Will I love The Stranger in the Woods?

As the back cover so prominently states, “Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it.” That sentence is a concise summary of how I felt after coming home from the Iraq War.

So traumatized, so repulsed by humanity and our ugliness, I felt an overwhelming desire to never be a part of society again. And I spent years isolating, viewing the world from a removed window.

Reading this book was like talking with an old friend. It allowed me to mentally share and feel a mutual understanding, and in the end, not feel quite… show more.

I am a strong introvert. I like my "me" time. But then there’s this man—Christopher Thomas Knight, who spent 27 years living in the woods of Maine alone. 

Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods is about Knight, who went into the forest, unprepared, in 1986 and didn’t come out again until he was arrested in 2013.

He survived by growing to understand the woods and being an excellent thief—both in the sense that he was good at lifting things and was, as much as possible, a conscientious outlaw. 

I found this a compelling read, partly because of the terse… show more.

Finkel tells the true story of Christopher Knight, who wandered into the Maine woods in 1986 and stayed there, alone, for the next 25 years or so, with no contact with other humans. He lived off of food and supplies he stole from nearby homes and camps, engaging in more than one thousand burglaries.

As one might suspect, not much happened to Knight during his self-imposed exile, but Finkel does a great job of reconstructing how he survived and why he stayed away from other humans for so long.  Knight makes Thoreau look like a piker.

The very idea that someone could abandon modern life and live for so long in the middle of a wood in Maine, in the USA, for close to 30 years, without being found, I find incredible. What Christopher Knight decided to do here isn’t a million miles from Chris McCandless in my earlier book recommendation, but he lasted a lot longer and was undoubtedly more successful. It takes a very special kind of person to become a true hermit, but at some time in our lives, almost all of us will wonder what it’s like to disappear, just to leave… show more.

How can a man live in isolation for 27 years without anyone knowing his whereabouts? Stranger in the Woods is a fascinating book about raw, creative survival by a man who escapes society. It gives a stunning insight into how you can truly leave no trace while living in the Woods.