Jay Griffiths at Cody's Books January 31, 2007

JAY GRIFFITHS arrives with WILD: An Elemental Journey. Jay Griffiths’ new book is a love song to the earth’s wildest places, and to the indigenous people who inhabit them, from the fecund rainforest of the Amazon to the stark beauty of Antarctic ice fields, the coral reefs of the South Seas, the (melting) snows of Kilimanjaro, to the vanishing songlines of aboriginal Australia. Griffiths sets off in search of “a quality of wildness which – like art, sex, love and all the other intoxicants – has a rising swing ringing through it. A drinker of wildness, I was tipsy with it before I began and roaring drunk by the end.” In turns exuberant, furious, hilarious, awestruck, and infused with the spirit of the land itself, Griffiths takes us to places where even minor mistakes can be deadly, where the earth’s deepest secrets can be seen and felt, and where encroaching “civilization” is proving far more savage than anything in nature might devise. There is an Inuktitut word, nuannaarpoq that means “taking extravagant pleasure in being alive”. In WILD, Jay Griffiths both takes and gives, in equal measure, such extravagant pleasure. Griffiths is the author of A Sideways Look at Time; her writing has appeared in Utne, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The Ecologist, and Wild Earth. 7:00 PM, Cody’s Fourth Street, Berkeley

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