So many insights!! Great book! ( )

4.5 stars

Our modern world we enjoy so many comforts. We can control our temperature, order food, and clean our house from our phones all while sitting on our recliner. But what is all this comfortable living has made us soft, physically and mentally?

While regaling us a fascinating story of a month long caribou hunt, Micheal throws ideas and theories of unattended consequences of our modern life. Is the pinnacle of life really sitting in a comfortable chair, watching Netflix, and eating an UberEats delivered meal?

Michael Easter does say a lot of things that resonate with me. Modern life has stunted us, physically and mentally.

( )

I had a hard time finishing this book. It's written from a place of astonishing privilege that is difficult for me to relate to. If you have the money to buy high tech survival gear, fly deep into Alaska, and charter bush planes (yes plural because the survival gear is too heavy for a plane small enough to land at the ultimate destination) to spend a month running after caribou while wifey takes care of everything back in the land of civilization, this is the book for you! If you have the time and inclination to challenge yourself to move an 85 pound rock several miles underwater (breathe. dive. move rock. repeat), this is the book for you. If you have the cultural insensitivity to appropriate a technical term for Shinto religious purification by means of cold water and apply it to the above (misogi), this is definitely the book for you.

Lots of good stuff to think about, but the author's attitude annoys the heck out of me. Perhaps that's because my life is not actually that comfortable!!

I had this book on my wishlist to purchase, but removed it. I think one read will suffice. But I see from reviews on Amazon and Goodreads that mine is a minority view.

The structure of each chapter of the central part of the book follows a pattern. First we hear something about the Great Adventurous Caribou Hunt, in which the author and his posse suffer boredom, fatigue, hunger, and cold. This segues into authorial musings, interviews, and accounts of research on some topic, after which the episode wraps up to end the chapter. There is often good stuff in the centre bits. In Chapter 11, we learn about why handheld phones are very bad for adults as well as children and boredom is good, and hear of a test of creativity that is a better predictor than IQ of life success. Chapter 12 introduces Forest Bathing and the benefits of even small amounts of time in nature. Chapter 13 praises silence. As starvation sets in, the author explains weight loss and gain; closer to the killing of The Doomed Caribou, there's a consideration of death (which I wasn't really expecting because one of the important rules of "misogi" is DON'T DIE). As they lug the hundreds of pounds of meat back to camp, we are told about movement and something called rucking, which means carrying a heavy rucksack. It's good for you. The book wraps up with the author, back in civilization after a month without bathing, taking a shower and explaining how cleanliness is actually bad for us. Then we get three brief looks at groups of people who are particularly healthy. I didn't feel that we got enough information about them to assess the level of discomfort in their lives. And that's it. The book ends with an index, which is a very good thing when this number of topics are covered. ( )