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The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True HermitAmazon Videos

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The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit Kindle Edition

by Michael Finkel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality—not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.

“A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” —The Wall Street Journal

In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries. Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Christopher Knight lived for 27 years in the woods of Maine with almost no human interaction, surviving by pilfering food and supplies. Opening with the account of how Knight was captured by an ex-marine after stealing from a local camp, this book begins on an exciting note, though the pace slows as Finkel weaves in research about the science of isolation along with an exploration of the philosophical and nature writing that might lead someone like Knight to seek seclusion. An extension of Finkel's 2014 GQ article "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit," this title goes into detail about the lengths to which Knight went in order to stay alive. Teens who are drawn to survival stories will appreciate reading about the harsh conditions Knight faced, including freezing weather, isolation, and lack of food, and the problem-solving skills on which he had to rely. This introspective look at the hermit life throughout time focuses on the ethical issues involved in one man's attempt to break free of society. VERDICT Hand this volume to mature and thoughtful teens who love Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild or are interested in philosophy, science, or nature.—Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ

Review

“A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Astonishing. . . . An absorbing exploration of solitude and man’s eroding relationship with the natural world.” —The Atlantic

“Campfire-friendly and thermos-ready, easily drained in one warm, rummy slug. It also raises a variety of profound questions—about the role of solitude, about the value of suffering, about the diversity of human needs.” —The New York Times

“[A] fascinating story. . . . Finkel manages to pry powerful words from the man who may hold the world title for silent retreat.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Reveals, in vivid detail, how Christopher Knight escaped society more completely than most anybody else in human history.” —Outside

“[An] intriguing account of Knight’s capture and confessions.” —USA Today

“A story that takes the two primary human relationships—to nature and to one another—and deftly upends our assumptions about both. This was a breathtaking book to read and many weeks later I am still thinking about the implications for our society and—by extension—for my own life.” —Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“As strong as Finkel’s storytelling instincts and prose are, his greatest feat in writing The Stranger in the Woods is the journalistic diligence and humanity he brought to Knight. . . . Through Finkel, Knight is able to speak up with his own voice at last.” —Paste

“[Knight’s] story will speak to anyone who has ever walked through the wilderness and considered, even for a moment, whether ever to leave.” —Field & Stream

“Moving and haunting. . . . A beautifully rendered, carefully researched story.” —PopMatters

“Riveting. . . . A stunning look inside at the life and inner thoughts of one of our era’s most confounding characters.” —Bangor Daily News

“Thought-provoking and enduring . . . Will leave readers thinking deeply about modern society, the search for meaning, and the impact of solitude. Finkel is a skilled storyteller.” —Portland Press Herald (Maine)

“I was drawn through these pages in a single sitting—their pull is true and magnetic. . . . [Knight’s] tale becomes universal thanks to the expert care of Finkel’s writing. . . The Stranger in the Woods is, ultimately, a meditation on the pains of social obligation and the longing toward retreat that resides in us all.” —Michael Harris, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Michael Finkel has done something magical with this profound book . . . [His] investigation runs deep, summoning . . . the human history of our own attempts to find meaning in a noisy world.” —Michael Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain

“Chris Knight is an American original . . . I burned through this haunting tale in one rapt sitting.” —John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

About the Author

MICHAEL FINKEL is the author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, which was adapted into a 2015 major motion picture. He has written for National Geographic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in western Montana.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 16

Knight lived in the dirt but was cleaner than you. Way cleaner. Pine needles and mud don’t make you dirty, except superficially. The muck that matters, the bad bacteria, the evil virus, is typically passed through coughs and sneezes and handshakes and kisses. The price of sociability is sometimes our health. Knight quarantined himself from the human race and thus avoided our biohazards. He stayed phenomenally healthy. Though he suffered deeply at times, he insists he never once had a medical emergency, or a serious illness, or a bad accident, or even a cold.

During the summers, especially in the early years, he was strong, fit, and spry. “You should have seen me in my twenties—I ruled the land I walked upon, it was mine,” Knight said, exposing the prideful streak that runs below his surface of contrition. “Why shouldn’t I claim it as my own? No one else was there. I was in control. I controlled it as much as I wanted. I was lord of the woods.”

Poison ivy grows throughout the area; its prevalence prevented some people from searching for his site. Knight kept a little jingle in his head—“leaves of three, let it be”—and so ably memorized where each patch grew that even at night he didn’t brush against it. He says he was never once afflicted.

Lyme disease, a bacterial illness transmitted through tick bites that can cause partial paralysis, is endemic to central Maine, but Knight was spared that as well. He brooded about Lyme for a while, then came to a realization: “I couldn’t do anything about it, so I stopped thinking about it.”

Living in the woods, subject to the whims of nature, offers a great deal of autonomy but not much control. At first, Knight worried about everything: snowstorms might bury him, hikers could find him, the police would capture him. Gradually, methodically, he shed most of his anxiety.

But not all. Being too relaxed, he felt, was also a danger. In appropriate doses, worry was useful, possibly lifesaving. “I used worry to encourage thought,” he said. “Worry can give you an extra prod to survive and plan. And I had to plan.”

At the conclusion of each thieving mission, he was absolved temporarily of worry. The order in which he ate his food was governed by the pace of spoilage, ground beef to Twinkies. When he was down to little more than flour and shortening, he’d mix those together with water and make biscuits. He never stole homemade meals or unwrapped items, for fear someone might poison him, so everything he took came sealed in a carton or can. He ate every morsel, scraping the containers clean. Then he deposited the wrappers and cartons in his camp’s dump, stuffed between boulders at the boundary of his site.

The dump was scattered over an area of about a hundred square feet. One section was devoted to items like propane tanks and old mattresses and sleeping bags and books, another to food containers. Even in the food area, there was no odor. Knight added layers of dirt and leaves to aid with composting, which eliminated any smell, but most of the packaging was waxed cardboard or plastic, slow to disintegrate. Upon excavation, the colors on many boxes remained garish, superlatives and exclamation points and rococo typography popping from the soil while robins chirped in the branches above.

The archeological record contained in his dump revealed why Knight’s only significant health issue was his teeth. He brushed regularly, he stole toothpaste, but did not see a dentist and his teeth began to rot. It didn’t help that his culinary preferences never progressed beyond the sugar-and-processedfood palate of a teenager. “ ‘Cooking’ is too kind a word for what I did,” he said.

A staple meal was macaroni and cheese. Dozens of macand-cheese boxes were buried between the rocks, along with several empty spice bottles—black pepper, garlic powder, hot sauce, blackened seasoning. Often, when Knight was inside a cabin with a good spice rack, he would grab a new bottle and try it out on his macaroni and cheese.

Also in his dump was a flattened thirty-ounce container from cheddar-flavored Goldfish crackers, a five-pound tub from Marshmallow Fluff, and a box that had held sixteen Drake’s Devil Dogs. There were packages from graham crackers, tater tots, baked beans, shredded cheese, hot dogs, maple syrup, chocolate bars, cookie dough. Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and Tyson chicken strips. Country Time lemonade and Mountain Dew. El Monterey spicy jalapeño and cheese chimichangas.

All of this came from a single kitchen-sink-sized hole, dug out by hand. Knight had fled the modern world only to live off the fat of it. The food, Knight pointed out, wasn’t exactly his choice. It was first selected by the cabin owners of North Pond, then snatched by him. He did steal a little money, an average of fifteen dollars a year—“a backup system,” he called it—and lived an hour’s walk from the Sweet Dreams convenience store and deli, but never went there. The last time he ate at a restaurant, or even sat at a table, was at some fast-food place during his final road trip.

He stole frozen lasagna, canned ravioli, and Thousand Island dressing. You can dig in the dump until you’re lying on your side, arm buried to the shoulder, and more keeps emerging. Cheetos and bratwurst and pudding and pickles. Quarry a trench deep enough to fight a war from—Crystal Light, Cool Whip, Chock full o’Nuts, Coke—and you still won’t reach bottom.

So he wasn’t a gourmet. He didn’t care what he ate. “The discipline I practiced in order to survive did away with cravings for specific food. As long as it was food, it was good enough.” He spent no more than a few minutes preparing meals, yet he often passed the fortnight between raids without leaving camp, filling much of the time with chores, camp maintenance, hygiene, and entertainment.

His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there’s innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It’s part of being human.

To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.

The reading selection offered by the cabins was often dispiriting. With books, Knight did have specific desires and cravings—in some ways, reading material was more important to him than food—though when he was famished for words, he’d subsist on whatever the nightstands bestowed, highbrow or low.

He liked Shakespeare, Julius Caesar especially, that litany of betrayal and violence. He marveled at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, sensing her kindred spirit. For the last seventeen years of her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Massachusetts and spoke to visitors only through a partly closed door. “Saying nothing,” she wrote, “sometimes says the most.”

Knight wished he’d been able to procure more poetry written by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a fellow native of Maine, born in the coastal village of Rockland in 1892. He quoted her bestknown lines—“My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night”—and then added, “I tried candles in my camp for a number of years. Not worth it to steal them.”

If he were forced to select a favorite book, it might be The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. “It’s concise,” Knight said, a quick twelve hundred pages, “and impressive as any novel.” He stole every book on military history he saw

He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. “What’s the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more than there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.”

Knight’s disdain for Thoreau was bottomless—“he had no deep insight into nature”—but Ralph Waldo Emerson was acceptable. “People are to be taken in very small doses,” wrote Emerson. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. “Good walking,” says the Tao, “leaves no tracks.”

Robert Frost received a thumbs-down—“I’m glad his reputation is starting to fade”—and Knight said that when he ran out of toilet paper, he sometimes tore pages from John Grisham novels. He mentioned that he didn’t like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn’t quite true. “I don’t like people who like Jack Kerouac,” he clarified.

Knight stole portable radios and earbuds and tuned in daily, voices through the waves another kind of human presence. For a while he was fascinated by talk radio. He listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh. “I didn’t say I liked him. I said I listened to him.” Knight’s own politics were “conservative but not Republican.” He added, perhaps unnecessarily, “I’m kind of an isolationist.”

Later he got hooked on classical music—Brahms and Tchaikovsky, yes; Bach, no. “Bach is too pristine,” he said. Bliss for him was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and, above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Nothing in all the world received higher praise from Knight than Lynyrd Skynyrd. “They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years,” he proclaimed.

On one raid he stole a Panasonic black-and-white fiveinch-diagonal television. This was why he needed so many car and boat batteries—to power the TV. Knight was adept at wiring batteries together, in series and parallel. He also carried off an antenna and hid it high in his treetops.

He said that everything shown on PBS was “carefully crafted for liberal baby boomers with college degrees,” but the best thing he watched while in the woods was a PBS program, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. He was able to recite parts of the show verbatim. “I still remember Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife,” said Knight. “It brought tears to my eyes.” Ballou, a major in the Union army, wrote to Sarah on July 14, 1861, and was killed at the First Battle of Bull Run before the letter was delivered. The note spoke of “unbounded love” for his children, and Ballou said his heart was attached to his wife’s “with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break”—an expression of human connection that made Knight weep, even if he wasn’t compelled to seek it himself.

Knight was aware of world events and politics, but he seldom had any reaction. Everything seemed to be happening far away. He burned through all his batteries after September 11, 2001, and never watched television again. “Car batteries were so heavy and difficult to steal anyway,” he said. He repurposed the ones he had as anchor weights for guylines, and after he stole a radio that received television audio signals, he switched to listening to TV stations on the radio; “theater of the mind,” he called it. Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond were his television-on-the-radio favorites.

“I do have a sense of humor,” Knight said. “I just don’t like jokes. Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke—a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.” His favorite comedians were the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and George Carlin. The last movie he saw in a theater was the 1984 comedy Ghostbusters.

He never bothered listening to sports; they bored him, every one of them. For news, there were five-minute updates at the top of the hour on WTOS, the Mountain of Pure Rock, out of Augusta. Also, he said, he sometimes listened to French news stations out of Quebec. He didn’t speak French, but he understood most of it.

He liked handheld video games. His rule for stealing them was that they had to appear outdated; he didn’t want to take a kid’s new one. He’d be stealing those in a couple years anyway. He enjoyed Pokémon, Tetris, and Dig Dug. “I like games that require thought and strategy. No shoot-’em-ups. No mindless repetitive motion.” Electronic Sudoku was great, and crossword puzzles in magazines were welcome challenges, but he never took a deck of cards to play solitaire, and he doesn’t like chess. “Chess is too two-dimensional, too finite of a game.”

He didn’t create any sort of art—“I’m not that type of person”—nor did he spend any nights away from his camp. “I have no desire to travel. I read. That’s my form of travel.” He never even glimpsed Maine’s celebrated coastline. He claimed that he did not speak to himself aloud, not a word. “Oh, you mean like typical hermit behavior, huh? No, never.”

Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. “I’d rather take it to my grave,” he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.”

Knight’s ability to hold a grudge was impressive. Though many National Geographic magazines were buried beneath his tent, he despised the publication. “I didn’t even like stealing them,” he said. “I only looked at them when I was desperate. They’re really only good for burying in the dirt. That glossy paper lasts a long time.”

His aversion to National Geographic extends back to his youth. When Knight was in high school, he was reading a copy and came across a photo of a young Peruvian shepherd standing beside a road, crying. Behind him were several dead sheep, struck by a car as the boy had been trying to guide them. The photograph was later reprinted in a book of National Geographic’s all-time greatest portraits.

It incensed Knight. “They published a photo of the boy’s humiliation. He had failed his family, who had entrusted him with the herd. It’s disgusting that everybody can see a little boy’s failure.” Knight, still furious about the image thirty years later, was a man acutely attuned to the ravages of shame. Had he done something shameful before he’d fled to the forest? He insisted that he had not.

Knight had a strong distaste for big cities, filled with helpless intellectuals, people with multiple degrees who couldn’t change a car’s oil. But, he added, it wasn’t as if rural areas were Valhalla. “Don’t glorify the country,” he said, then tossed off a line from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto about escaping “the idiocy of rural life.”

He acknowledged, forthrightly, that a couple of cabins were enticing because of their subscriptions to Playboy. He was curious. He was only twenty years old when he disappeared, and had never been out on a date. He imagined that finding love was something like fishing. “Once I was in the woods, I had no contact, so there was no baited hook for me to bite upon. I’m a big fish uncaught.”

One book that Knight never buried in his dump or packed away in a plastic tote—he kept it with him in his tent—was Very Special People, a collection of brief biographies of human oddities: the Elephant Man, General Tom Thumb, the DogFaced Boy, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and hundreds of sideshow performers. Knight himself often felt that he was something of circus freak, at least on the inside.

“If you’re born a human oddity,” says the introductory chapter of Very Special People, “every day of your life, starting in infancy, you are made aware that you are not as others are.” When you get older, it continues, things are likely to get worse. “You may hide from the world,” advises the book, “to avoid the punishment it inflicts on those who differ from the rest in mind or body.”

There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that the writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. “I recognize myself in the main character,” he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart from all others for about twenty years. The book’s opening lines are: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”

Knight also expressed no shortage of self-loathing, but it was offset by a fierce pride, as well as an occasional trace of superiority. So, too, with the unnamed narrator of Underground. On the final page of the book, the narrator drops all humbleness and says what he feels: “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.”

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01GYPY884
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 7, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8.6 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101875698
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #70,296 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Crime & Criminal Biographies
- #6 in Forests & Rainforests
- #35 in Travel Biographies & Memoirs

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Michael Finkel

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Michael Finkel is the author of "The Art Thief," "The Stranger in the Woods," an international bestseller, and "True Story," which was adapted into a 2015 motion picture starring James Franco and Jonah Hill. He has reported from more than 50 countries and written for National Geographic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Sportswriting, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. He lives with his family in northern Utah and southern France.

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Customers find the book well-written and dramatic, providing deep insight into the subject's inner thoughts. Moreover, they appreciate the author's portrayal of the subject as a fascinating and intelligent person, with one review noting how it documents their relationship well. The book receives positive feedback for its readability, with one customer describing it as an easy but suspenseful read. However, customers express mixed feelings about the sadness in the narrative.

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Story quality Readability Intelligence Writing quality Personality Empathy Survival Sadness

590 customers mention "Story quality"532 positive58 negative

Customers find the book's story compelling and dramatic, effectively fleshing out the man's narrative.

"...as a great piece of investigative journalism combined with masterful storytelling...." Read more

"...And Michael Finkel tells a very good story. From a technical standpoint, he is at the top of his craft as a writer...." Read more

"I found this story fascinating and easy to visualize. As a teacher, I had several students who were on the autism spectrum...." Read more

"...The book is not only an enchanting collection of facts but an amazing story of a person’s 27-year survival in solitude and isolation...." Read more

384 customers mention "Readability"363 positive21 negative

Customers find the book to be an excellent and quick read, with one customer noting it's easy to read briefly each night.

"...From the background on Knight’s family, to the pace at which the text moves, to the inner-workings of the mind of a man who risked everything, even..." Read more

"Well written, a great read, as soon as I was done with it I had to flip it over and read it again! This man’s life is so interesting!" Read more

"...he does, and he went to extraordinary lengths to do so accurately and fairly...." Read more

"...It's a good book, well written and was enjoyable to read up on this sad, singular human who craves alone time more than anything else life has to..." Read more

247 customers mention "Intelligence"237 positive10 negative

Customers appreciate the book's intelligence, praising its great insight and detailed descriptions of the subject's inner thoughts, with one customer noting it is more deeply researched than expected.

"...(As a side note, Outside Podcast has an amazing episode on the science of what it’s like to freeze to death, and it’s fascinating.)..." Read more

"...This man’s life is so interesting!" Read more

"Exceptionally well-written and insightful biography." Read more

"...mind the bit about other hermits throughout history, some insight into solitude in general and some psychs trying to analyze his behavior...." Read more

201 customers mention "Writing quality"184 positive17 negative

Customers praise the writing style of the book, describing it as well-crafted and highly readable, with one customer noting the author's straightforward prose.

"...Secondly, Finkel’s prose is straightforward and lacks the density of academic writing. After all, Finkel’s a journalist and not an academic...." Read more

"Well written, a great read, as soon as I was done with it I had to flip it over and read it again! This man’s life is so interesting!" Read more

"Exceptionally well-written and insightful biography." Read more

"I found this story fascinating and easy to visualize. As a teacher, I had several students who were on the autism spectrum...." Read more

41 customers mention "Personality"41 positive0 negative

Customers find the subject of the book fascinating and intelligent, with one customer noting how well the author documents their relationship.

"...It's respectful, quiet, and calm. I can tell Finkel has a deep respect for his subject. Well worth the read." Read more

"...Aside from that, we find the man quite fascinating and are amazed how he lived among people without ever being seen for that long right under their..." Read more

"...And this is not fiction. It is a true story about a very remarkable individual. Thank you, Michael Finkel, for telling it so beautifully...." Read more

"...This book is far more than an odd biography of an eccentric hermit, it is profound, and I enjoyed the history of hermits and what they learned from..." Read more

36 customers mention "Empathy"36 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's empathetic approach, noting its heart and soul and deep sense of peace, with one customer highlighting how it preserves the humanness of the subject.

"...I immediately felt a deep sense of peace, and fell asleep...." Read more

"...He shared that he had a good relationship with his family, although his family members all seemed to be extreme introverts...." Read more

"...to know him, clearly better than anyone else has, and to represent him with such dignity, astounds me...." Read more

"...This book is no different. It's respectful, quiet, and calm. I can tell Finkel has a deep respect for his subject. Well worth the read." Read more

23 customers mention "Survival"23 positive0 negative

Customers praise the book's portrayal of survival in the woods, with one customer noting how the author explains how the man managed to stay alive for such a long time.

"...as a sense of bewilderment at the length of Knight’s tenure, his ability to survive, and the absoluteness of his solitude:..." Read more

"...for the insights it gives into an extraordinary mind and the amazing tale of survival that very few could have accomplished." Read more

"...Although a thief, that he was selective and caused no damage in breaking or entering was so interesting...." Read more

"...It takes a lot of courage to do what he did and survive that long although he did have the moral dilemma of having to steal to eat It takes a lot..." Read more

19 customers mention "Sadness"10 positive9 negative

Customers have mixed reactions to the sadness in the book, with some finding it a truly sad story that evokes several emotions, while others find it overdone with psychological content.

"...built and maintained a new, solitary life, this book is also a bitter-sweet treatise on what motivates humans to take their particular life paths...." Read more

"...I agree with some reviewers - it felt somewhat exploitive...." Read more

"This story evokes several emotions...." Read more

"...I felt very sad about the ending...it is not how I would have liked to end up. I think this is a book very worth reading." Read more

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Clyde S. Dale
Civilization and its Magnificent Discontent: A Masterpiece of Research Journalism
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2018
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

…[L]ocals were enraged by Knight’s actions. The actual items he stole might be minor, but he also took people’s peace of mind. Their sense of security. Some said they were afraid to sleep in their own cabins, afraid for decades.

‘I felt violated, over and over again,’ said Debbie Baker, who has owned a place on North Pond with her husband for more than twenty years. ‘I lost count how many times he broke in.’ Her two sons, when they were young, were terrified of the Hermit. They had nightmares about him.

So frequently, in our modernized and “progressive” society, we romanticize the escape into the wild; and while it’s true that people have been retreating to nature for its restorative powers since the beginning of time—Jesus, Buddha, Gilgamesh, St. Anthony—it was really the literature of the Romantic period—Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge – that began to codify the retreat into Nature as a literary, as well as a physical, aesthetic. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, and Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, who found the French Alps “sublime and magnificent”, and whose “scenes afforded [him] the greatest consolation that [he] was capable of receiving” are but two examples. In the American tradition those carrying the torch of the Romantics begin with Emerson, Thoreau and Muir. Thoreau, who famously moved to the woods because he wanted to suck all the marrow out of life, Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” and Muir’s near death experiences in a Sequoia and on a glacier all attempt to accomplish the same goal: to find Life by obliterating ego, to find one’s self by seeking Nature. So, what happens when someone seeks out Nature not to return? Michael Finkel’s telling of Christopher Knight’s story, in his book The Stranger in the Woods, explores that question.

In 1986, Christopher Knight quit his job, cashed his final paycheck, got in his Subaru Brat and headed south to Florida; he turned around and drove north all the way to central Maine, down one dirt road, then another, until the car could no longer navigate the path. He drove his car as far into the woods as the trail would take him, threw his keys in the center console, got out and started walking. He never looked back.

For almost three decades Knight lived virtually unknown in solitude. On a body of water called North Pond, just about smack in the middle of the state, he constructed an inconspicuous camp where he remained, hardly ever leaving except to steal supplies and food. He talked to virtually no one in nearly a quarter century, save a lone hiker and some fisherman, all of whom came upon him accidentally over the course of his tenure in the wild. Outside of those encounters, he never spoke. He listened to the radio, he read, he meditated—if meditation is sitting quietly and simply being—and he came face to face with death; or as he called it, “the Lady of the Woods”. He also committed approximately 1,000 instances of breaking and entering and petty theft. It was how he survived. In so doing, he inhabited a curious space between shunning civilization completely, and being totally dependent on it for survival.

This book should be on your shelf for any number of reasons, but one of them is that this book is an incredibly quick read. You won’t need days, weeks or months to finish it. I think it took me a total of six hours, give or take, to digest this, and I don’t really consider myself a speedy reader; in fact, I’m still trudging, after several months, through Michener’s Alaska: I love it, but it’s tedious. Finkel’s book moves with rapidity for two reasons: first, it’s fascinating. How does someone endure nearly thirty years in a tent through twenty-seven New England winters? Additionally, he does this without so much as hardly talking to or touching another human being. He doesn’t take months to prepare for this ordeal, or perhaps years, like Chris McCandless from John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, nor does he take supplies. He had neither a map, nor compass nor food. Just himself. And he wasn’t looking to find himself or some deeper meaning in life like Cheryl Strayed: he was looking to get lost. Secondly, Finkel’s prose is straightforward and lacks the density of academic writing. After all, Finkel’s a journalist and not an academic. He’s much more of a story teller than a story analyst. So, readers will find themselves both engrossed with and gratified by the book’s content and pace.

Readers will also identify with Finkel’s admiration for Knight. Imagine living not just alone in the woods, but also in a camp, a tent (not a cabin or shack for shelter), cooking over a propane stove or grill, shitting in a hole in the ground for twenty-seven years. (Knight lived in constant fear of being caught, and so never once started a fire. Not even for warmth. Living through almost thirty… thirty! Maine winters.) Finkel writes with what I interpret as a sense of bewilderment at the length of Knight’s tenure, his ability to survive, and the absoluteness of his solitude:

None of these hermits remained as secluded as long as Knight did, at least not without significant help from assistants, or without being corralled into a monastery or convent, which is what happened to the Desert Fathers and Mothers. There might have existed—or it’s possible, currently exist—hermits more completely hidden than Knight, but if so, they have never been found. Capturing Knight was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid. His seclusion was not pure, he was a thief, but he persisted for twenty-seven years while speaking a total of one word and never touching anyone else. Christopher Knight, you could argue, is the most solitary person in all of human history.

It may also be hard for readers not to see some chutzpa in Knight’s ability to withstand incredibly difficult ordeals: ‘Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don’t think. It’s like there’s no atheists in a foxhole. Same with negative twenty. That’s when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth.’ It may be true that science has no definitive answer for precisely what temperature hypothermia begins to set in, but it must be very close at negative twenty. (As a side note, Outside Podcast has an amazing episode on the science of what it’s like to freeze to death, and it’s fascinating.) In some respects, Knight’s actions are near super-human, perhaps even heroic.

On the other hand, Finkel does not gloss over the more unsavory aspects of this story: the fact the Knight was a terror to the local population of North Pond. Debbie Baker, one of the person’s interviewed for Finkel’s story and quoted at the top of this piece, perfectly highlights the fact that this is not some romantic narrative about one seeking refuge from the monstrousness of civilization. Rather, Knight was the horror. To Baker’s children Knight was the monster in the closet and under the bed, the boogeyman, the thing that goes bump in the night and every other unsavory beast that children dream up in the deep dark of their minds—except he was real. Knight had become the reason children need night lights. Knight himself acknowledged as much after his arrest in 2013. In speaking to Finkel from prison he said,

There’s no justification for my stealing … And I don’t want people trying to justify my bad behavior in an attempt to sully what they admire in me. Take the whole package, good and bad. Judge me on that. Don’t cherry pick. Don’t make excuses for me.

This distinguishes Knight from those who seek either refuge or enlightenment in solitude, or both. Make a plan, take only what you need, leave only footsteps. Thoreau (for whom Knight had no end of loathing) came into town regularly, if only to socialize, and while it’s true that it’s been over 150 years since he set up shop at Walden Pond, all that’s left is the foundation of his “cottage”: McCandless had a plan and many people to help him along the way, and all did so willingly: Bill Bryson uses his A Walk in the Woods as an opportunity to learn and teach about the ecology of the East coast and the Appalachian Trail: Wendell Berry talks about the restorative power of crossing “into the woods”. Yet, each of these figures operates with the understanding, at least tacitly, that without civilization such forays into the wild would not be possible. Moreover, each did so without directly causing harm to other humans, or presumably, the environment.

Knight was different. Not only was he a terror to the local population, but he also left a veritable dump behind: a good deal of empty propane containers buried in the ground: twenty-seven years worth of shit—which, contrary to what you might think, doesn’t decompose when simply buried: hundreds of magazines: countless food wrappers. Additionally, Knight wanted to reap the reward without sewing the seed. Live off the fat of the land without in any way contributing to it. All this even though a number of North Pond residents offered, by way of notes on doorsteps, to leave him whatever he needed or desired so long as he didn’t break in again. In fact, a hermit named Meng-Hu, who runs Hermitary.com, a website for the hermit community—yes, that’s a thing—noted exactly this on his website:

‘The idea of a hermit who steals for a living confirms the worst stereotype of the “eremite as parasite” … ‘No historical hermit, especially those motivated by a spiritual sense, but also wilderness hermits, has ever had the slightest motive to encroach upon anybody’s belongings—be that mind, body, time, space, or goods’.

Readers may be conflicted regarding this hard-line stance; because while we do not condone or excuse such behavior, we may also see something of the stoic in Knight’s existence. Personally, I view Knight not so much as being lazy or as a parasite, but as willing to go to any lengths to make his time his own. To have no master but himself. In his own words, “You’re just there. You are”.

All in all, Finkel’s narrative stands as a great piece of investigative journalism combined with masterful storytelling. From the background on Knight’s family, to the pace at which the text moves, to the inner-workings of the mind of a man who risked everything, even his own life in those Maine winters, not to have anything to do with society, readers will find it difficult to put this book down, and chances are they’ll be huddled over this one by lamp-light into the wee hours.

For more visit: journeyofathousandmiles.blog

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Frank/Theresa in Tennessee
No real plan for surviving
Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2024
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I really don't know what to think about this book. I can relate to Christopher's wanting solitude and being away from other people. And living in nature sounds wonderful in theory. He didn't even hunt or kill animals in his desire to survive. But then he was a habitual thief. He broke into homes and took other people's possessions in order to survive. This is flawed thinking. His ethics were very skewed. I think he probably did have some kind of mental disability. He should have put more thought into how to survive lawfully in isolation. Plus he have some money put aside so that he could have gone to the store and purchased items he needed. But then he would've had to interact with other people? I also wonder if Christopher Knight had passed away since this book wasn't supposed to be written until that time?

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Laura
Fascinating!!!!
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2025
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Well written, a great read, as soon as I was done with it I had to flip it over and read it again! This man’s life is so interesting!

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Georgia Tyler
Excellent biography!
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2025
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Exceptionally well-written and insightful biography.

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Cecil T
Amusing irony
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2018
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Man goes into woods for reasons unknown. Presumably to escape society but manages to continue connecting with society by indulging in books, games, tv and radio...created by the society he’s escaping or something.

Honestly wasn’t bothered by the fact that the book didn’t ever detail the “why”. I didn’t read this book to get some existential mantra to live by through a hermit’s journey into the wilderness. I was more fascinated by the claim that he lived outside through the freezing cold of Maine winters for so many years. And there wasn’t much of that detailed or discussed.

The book reads easily but not well. I don’t mind the bit about other hermits throughout history, some insight into solitude in general and some psychs trying to analyze his behavior. Of course some people are going to try to figure him out. Is he ill, past trauma, abuse, serial killer? It’s what we do naturally, try and explain actions and probably why a lot of people read the book to begin with. Yet upon reading other reviews acted like they wanted the guy respected and left alone because the author was a major creeper. Chris stole from people, he doesn’t get privacy or respect because he didn’t exactly give it. Oh but he never hurt anyone so it’s all forgivable?

If you’re mad they tried to make sense of his thievery and solitude by being intrusive, you can’t be mad you didn’t get the “why” to his loner lifestyle at the end.

The author is definitely insufferable in his quest to connect with this man who I suspect wasn’t what he was expecting. It’s like the author was putting his own reaching dreams of becoming a hermit into a man that was essentially just a really good thief.

It’s comical that a man who was touted as a hero because he lived out in the Maine woods (every “nature lovers” wet dream) just ended up being a self proclaimed conservative weirdo. A weirdo who was indifferent to people and nature while saying humans were poisoning the earth by wanting every “colorful fluffy thing” or some shat. Yet he buried propane tanks and trash like any other human and stole from the people he seemingly acted superior to.

You mean he didn’t live off the land, created waste and had nothing insightful to say other than he didn’t like Thoreau (how dare he!) Ahaha. Gotta give it three stars for that kind of whacky ironic unexpected twist!

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Gabriele
Very nice book
Reviewed in Italy on December 9, 2017
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This book is very nice and the story is peculiar. It's an easy read and you will indeed find difficoult to stop and not keep reading.

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C. S.
Lieblingsbuch
Reviewed in Germany on May 9, 2025
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Super interessanter Mensch, interessante Story. Das erste und bisher einzige Buch bei dem ich weinen musste.

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Bala
Excellent and fast read!
Reviewed in India on February 25, 2018
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Excellent, fast and intriguing read on the Hermit. Loved it from start till end. Much recommended for everyone to read this intriguing story.

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Michael Axtens
Survival, morality, questioning "sanity". This book has it all
Reviewed in Australia on February 20, 2018
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I suspect it will polarise, tantalise. What is right and wrong? Is he crazy? Is mental illness a social construction designed for convenience in interests of the "greater good"? Should this man be punished, left alone, supported or ignored? Explorations of the collective insanity of our society, the untrustworthiness of humans, the need for contact with others, and the difference between objective consideration of the many dilemmas posed by the case against Christopher Knight vs the expedient conclusions of those harmed by him... these and many themes make this, for me, a worthwhile book. Added to this is the drive of the author to pursue this man and the internal discussions meeting with him triggers.. fascinating.
If you want an escapist read, this book may not be for you, but if you question your current life and wonder about alternatives, Knight's life offers a window into an extreme option.

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Aristos C.
Vida na natureza longe da sociedade
Reviewed in Brazil on August 15, 2018
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Narrativa cativante sobre um rapaz de 20 anos que saiu para viver escondido em uma floresta e só foi descoberto 27 anos depois. O autor fez um brilhante trabalho jornalístico sobre essa história real, demonstrando muita empatia pelo personagem. O livro é muito bem escrito. Não se limita à narração de tudo que aconteceu nesse período de reclusão e após a descoberta do eremita, mas faz também um levantamento sobre o fenômeno da vida isolada da sociedade em várias culturas e épocas históricas, a partir da opinião de diversos autores.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Civilization and its Magnificent Discontent: A Masterpiece of Research Journalism

4.0 out of 5 stars No real plan for surviving

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!!!!

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent biography!

3.0 out of 5 stars Amusing irony

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5.0 out of 5 stars Very nice book

5.0 out of 5 stars Lieblingsbuch

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and fast read!

5.0 out of 5 stars Survival, morality, questioning "sanity". This book has it all

5.0 out of 5 stars Vida na natureza longe da sociedade

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Civilization and its Magnificent Discontent: A Masterpiece of Research Journalism

No real plan for surviving

Fascinating!!!!

Excellent biography!

Amusing irony

Very nice book

Lieblingsbuch

Excellent and fast read!

Survival, morality, questioning "sanity". This book has it all

Vida na natureza longe da sociedade