The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit - Michael Finkel

Well here goes another review about a book about which I'm not sure how to feel. On the one hand, I like the journalistic straight-forward delivery of The Stranger in the Woods. The book tries to avoid stating a belief one way or the other in the morality of Christopher Knight and what he did surviving in the woods for 27 years on his own. And it presents views of those who both admire and despise him. 

The story is about Christopher Knight. A Maine man who walks away from society and carves out a camp for himself in the Maine woods, close to a cottage community from whom he steals in order to survive. Is he a parasite on this community? Yes. But was his attempt to live alone the most simple life he could muster admirable? Maybe. Hard to say and it probably depends on what traits in other humans you admire. 

And all of this conflict is fine and should exist in a book like this. The part I didn't enjoy was near the end, where the author becomes more of a character in the story and less an observer. It had the intrusive questionable ethics feeling of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Christopher Knight walked away into the woods and stayed there for 27 years, never even lighting a fire in the dead of winter in order to be alone and unobserved. I admit it's fascinating, but clearly this is how this man lived and would have continued to want to live had he not been caught in the midst of a burglary. 

So when a journalist continually visits the man in jail and goes to visit even after the man has told the journalist that his deepest desire is to be left alone, where should the line be drawn? When does the quest for the story steamroll over the man's privacy? He did not inject himself into the public limelight, indeed he did the opposite. I can feel the author's own struggle with this question in the last chapters, but ultimately it just left a bad feeling for me. Like I, in reading this book, have participated and assisted in the intrusion into a deeply private person's life. 

Towards the end of the book, Knight tells the author that he can write whatever he wants, "after [Knight] is gone." But since he hasn't died, I would suspect that the publishing of this book is exceptionally painful to him and his family.

3/5 Stars.