“The Wanting Was a Wilderness”: A Trail Guide For the Memoirist

Alden Jones cover

From the moment Cheryl Strayed picks up her only remaining hiking boot, chucks it off the side of a ridge and continues her trek up the 2,653-mile-long Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed has any reader with a sense of adventure hooked into her best-selling memoir, Wild.

(Am I doing this whole book review thing right by first talking about a completely different book than the one I’m reviewing? Yes, in this case:) 

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Young and Adrift: A Review of Alden Jones’s “Unaccompanied Minors”

Unaccompanied Minors by Alden Jones (New American Press; 168 p.) In the 1980s, I went to an East Coast boarding school that was made notorious by a gang-rape of a drunk girl by a group of boys, a few years before I attended. It happened in the dorms after lights-out, and dozens of kids who weren’t participants knew about it and did nothing, including an eventual friend of mine. He was 14, terrified, and hid under his bed. As a […]

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