In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

by Kim Barnes

Book Overview

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960's, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385478216
• ISBN13: 9780385478212
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Honest and True

The reviewer from Lewiston, Idaho, Kim Barnes' home town, wants to suggest that there are things in IN THE WILDERNESS that didn't happen. What I can't figure out is how anyone could know that. The book is a memoir. It is told from the point of view of the writer, and Barnes early on tells us that she understands the faultiness of memory. How did this person manage to get inside the author's head?Answer: she/he didn't. Read the book and see. This is a book that bends over backwards to be fair and honest and true. The Lewiston reviewer's motives have more to do with something else--spite, maybe, or jealousy, who knows? IN THE WILDERNESS is a book that changes readers' lives. It's filled with the kind of grace we should all be envious of. It never, ever means to hurt, but to speak clearly and beautifully and, most of all, honestly. The same cannot be said of many books, nor of some reviews.

lyrical

I read this book as I hiked through the Sierras, and the effect was sublime. Barnes is a master story teller and wordsmith. The book plops the reader into the hardscrabble life of a girl growing up in logging camps amid colorful cast of characters. Her descriptions of nature - fish "fatter than a baby's leg" - and carefully plucked words are a joy to read. I can't believe no one else has reviewed this book! It soars above the current crop of mangy memoirs that fill books with words, but fail to get to the soul of the matter.

A rich, complex read.

Kim Barnes weaves a rich coming-of-age tale in a complex setting. Among the backdrop of harsh economic times, strict religious restraints and emotional repression, a girl struggles to find her way and some meaning in life. Barnes tell her story in a richly compelling manner, standing back from her life almost as an objective observer. I learned much from this book about an era and way of life that I hadn't known before.

A tender, honest, captivating memoir

Reaching into her family's history, narrating how her mother and father came to move to Pierce, ID, Kim Barnes begins a most tender, generous, and honest memoir. In part, it's a story about Clearwater County, Idaho in the late 1950's and on into the 1960's. It is as if the world of beat poetry, the space program, and campus unrest hardly existed. In the wilderness near Pierce, Idaho, life still has a settlement feel. I can attest to the accuracy of Barnes' portrayal. My mother taught school in nearby Weippe, Idaho in the early 1950's and her family still lives in Clearwater County seat, Orofino. We used to take drives up to Weippe, Pierce, and Headquarters and these towns seemed both barely settled and unsettled. It didn't seem anyone was going to stay long. For me, the most compelling dimension of Barnes' memoir was her family's Pentecostal Christian worship and practice. Told with probing compassion, Barnes lyrically describes how the cartography of her mind as a girl was drawn by the fundamentalism and moral restrictions of Pentecostalism. As this exploration deepened, and as Barnes describes her family moving to Lewiston, ID and herself becoming a teenager, my respect for Barnes blossomed. Given Barnes' rebellion against Pentecostalism, she easily could have demeaned her parents' Pentecostal practice. But, she does just the opposite. Yes, she chronicles her confusion, the tug-of-war in her soul as she rejects, accepts, and rejects again the comforts and constraints of this kind of church, but she also explores her respect for her parents, how much she is indebted to them for her openness to the transcendent (especially in nature), to the mysterious in life. For not turning her memoir into a reactionary bashing of Christian fundamentalism and for candidly exploring how she could leave home, but home never left her, I deeply admire Kim Barnes. For the beauty of her language, I praise her. I could not put this book down. Nor could I stop reading this book's sequel, Hungry for the World, which I've also reveiwed.

Been There!

Loved the book--not only because I graduated from the same high school two years later and knew Les Barnes, but because it so clearly captured the way Lewiston was in the 1970's: the choices that could be made and the cliques. It was so captivating that I couldn't put it down because my husband kept picking it up and reading it while I was trying to AND because it was such a great read!