03/29/2021
Junger follows Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging with a rambling reflection on the nature of freedom, grounded in a 400-mile hike he made “in segments over the course of a year” from Washington, D.C., to western Pennsylvania. To Junger and his unidentified companions (all told, eight people joined him at different parts of the hike), walking alongside railroad tracks, sleeping under bridges and in abandoned buildings, and dodging cops and security guards felt like something “ancient and hard.” His account of their travails (blisters, exhaustion, freezing cold weather) is interspersed with philosophical musings (“the inside joke about freedom... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing with obedience to another”), lyrical nature writing (the water in one Pennsylvania creek “tasted as though civilization was something in the future”), and observations about war, human endurance, and the settling of the American frontier. It’s a mixed bag—insights into how the Apaches and the Taliban overcame numerically superior forces brush up against random facts and statistics (people can predict, with 70% accuracy, the outcome of a U.S. senate race “based on a one-second glimpse of the candidates’ faces as they campaign”). Ultimately, the journey’s lack of purpose (only near the end of the book does Junger acknowledge that he was going through a divorce at the time) mirrors the book’s lack of focus. The result feels more self-indulgent than illuminating. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (May)
A powerful read. I would give a few fingers to be as concise, as dense, as powerful as Sebastian Junger is as a writer.” —Tim Ferris
“A fascinating look at freedom and community.” —Mackenzie Dawson, New York Post
“Freedom is less a travelogue than a meditation on what Americans have had to endure to gift us this galvanizing idea, which in Junger’s estimation is more complicated than we might presume and easily squandered." —Edward Nawotka, Los Angeles Times
“It’s such a slim little book with such a simple title— Freedom— but there’s nothing simple about the questions that word evokes...[An] elegant little book...it’s about a walk—and so much more.” —Robin Young, NPR Here & Now
“Readers who’ve enjoyed classics such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road will certainly find something worthwhile within Junger’s journey. And while Freedom has much more in common stylistically to modern classics such as Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild or Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, those books often used the journey’s encounters as a convenient jumping-off point for the author to contemplate their own existence. Conversely, Junger spends the majority of his time contemplating larger existential questions that not only affect him, but all of humanity...Still, Junger weaves in broad and complicated topics into the narrative and does so in an accessible way. He doesn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of the history of the region, nor does he meander or ramble when reflecting on his own existential dilemmas. He is concise and focused, but still manages to be both informative and vulnerable.” —Seth Combs, The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Junger contemplates the intersection of autonomy and coterie at a time when the word itself, while holding so much meaning, is so often misunderstood." —Sarah Sicard, Military Times
"The author known for The Perfect Storm and other nonfiction works, covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively, in this slim book. —Jim Kiest, San Antonio Express-News
“Junger observes, and reports, watches and appreciates, and his thoughts on his title subject will make you truly consider your own definition of this basic right. ‘Freedom’ is not an anti-freedom book; it underscores, and you shouldn't want to wait to open it.” —Daily Jefferson County Union
“[Junger] gives us richly detailed descriptions of landscape, camp sites, railroad infrastructure, and rumbling freight trains that carry menace as well as cargo...It’s a short book..but it packs a wallop with its vivid scenes of the tramping life interspersed with detours into human history.” —Arthur Hoyle, New York Journal of Books
“As a consummate writer, Junger has created a short, tight story that gets to the heart of the tensions of what it means to be human today.” —Book Marks
“Journalist and filmmaker Junger returns to the fertile ground of male camaraderie and the pushing of limits. This time, instead of Afghanistan, the setting is closer to home...the former frontier and wilderness of Pennsylvania. The setting is conducive to ruminations on the concept of freedom, and, with muscular prose and vivid, poetic descriptions, Junger both conjures the trek and ponders the nomadic lifestyle, Genghis Khan, Daniel Boone, fugitive slaves, the Seminole Indians, boxers, and the Gini coefficient.” —Ben Segedin, Booklist
“[Junger’s] account of their travails (blisters, exhaustion, freezing cold weather) is interspersed with philosophical musings (“the inside joke about freedom... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing with obedience to another”), lyrical nature writing (the water in one Pennsylvania creek “tasted as though civilization was something in the future”), and observations about war, human endurance, and the settling of the American frontier.” —Publishers Weekly
“Political philosophy and political debates are often respectively abstract and oppositional, but Junger uses everyday language and a broad view of human experience. Freedom is an approach to the topic based in reality and, as a result, one which speaks to real life. We need more books like it, because real life is where the struggles we have over freedom take place. And while it is not useless to read Rousseau, books like this offer more immediately relevant guidance as we pursue genuine freedom in our day-to-day lives.”—Elizabeth Stice, Front Porch Republic
“Freedom is essentially 133 pages of philosophical daydreams that educate and entertain. It is equally as thought provoking as Tribe and as enjoyable as Fire — his collection of short stories focused on dangerous jobs. There’s history, science, reflection, and beautiful prose. And of course, walking. Lots of walking.” —Mac Caltrider, Coffee or Die
"Like Hemingway, Orwell, or Churchill himself, Sebastian Junger is intoxicated by life's perilous extremities. He's chased the front in Bosnia, Serbia, and—most famously—Afghanistan. His voice is like a fingerprint, a baritone played on vocal cords pulled almost to the breaking point. Now the writer meditates on independence and interdependence as he, three friends, and a dog hike and camp rough along 400 miles of track right here in the relative safety of the U.S. of A. The vagrants march through rain, cook over open fires. Trains so heavy and fast "they seem to set the whole world in motion" explode the solitude. The hike stitches the narrative together, but all is window dressing for Junger's two great loves: courage and a naked heart. You'll hear it in his voice."
Like Hemingway, Orwell, or Churchill himself, Sebastian Junger is intoxicated by life’s perilous extremities. He’s chased the front in Bosnia, Serbia, and—most famously—Afghanistan. His voice is like a fingerprint, a baritone played on vocal cords pulled almost to the breaking point. Now the writer meditates on independence and interdependence as he, three friends, and a dog hike and camp rough along 400 miles of track right here in the relative safety of the U.S. of A. The vagrants march through rain, cook over open fires. Trains so heavy and fast “they seem to set the whole world in motion” explode the solitude. The hike stitches the narrative together, but all is window dressing for Junger’s two great loves: courage and a naked heart. You’ll hear it in his voice. B.H.C. 2022 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
2021-05-12
The bestselling author explores the lure of nomadism.
At the age of 51, childless and soon to be divorced, Junger spent much of one year walking 400 miles alongside railroad lines in the eastern U.S. with a changing cast of three companions and his dog. They called their trek “the Last Patrol”: an escape, “a temporary injunction against whatever was coming,” and an interlude of freedom from the restrictions and demands of conventional life. Because the swaths of property alongside railroad lines were “the least monitored” land in the country, it seemed a safe choice for the wanderers, who did not want to be mistaken for vagrants. “Most nights,” Junger notes, “we were the only people in the world who knew where we were.” The author’s contemplative, digressive narrative combines vivid details of the walk, which was completed in several segments, with political, social, and cultural history; anthropology; and science. He ruminates on nomadic society, hunter-gatherers, Indigenous peoples, the perilous escapes of runaway slaves, various wars, and conflicts that include Cain’s jealousy of Abel and Ireland’s Easter uprising. Sometimes these musings involve considerations of freedom; not always. “Throughout history,” he writes, “good people and bad have maintained their freedom by simply staying out of reach of those who would deprive them of it. That generally meant walking a lot.” Nomadism has romantic appeal for Junger, just as, he claims, it has had for “the settled world.” To hunter-gatherers, working the land seemed a form of subservience; nomadic societies, asserts the author, were more equitable than societies centered around land ownership. Among hunter-gatherers, “although leaders understandably had more prestige than other people, they didn’t have more rights.” Although the trip did not yield epiphanies, Junger finally arrived at a place where he decided to stop wandering and step into his future. It was time “to face my life.”
A meandering chronicle of a year on the road.
