Genre: Personal
Growth/Travel Memoir
Description:
“Separate yourself from the world’s hectic whirlwind and become part
of an Appalachian Trail hike into enchanting wilderness. Buy into Don
Defreeze’s personal narrative and be ticketed on a journey to supreme acuity.
The thread is the hike while various trail segments jog thoughts ranging from
philosophical to the practical, almost a discussion of reality’s nature. These
ideas collectively create a frame of reference which walks the reader into
symbiotic solitude and a personal challenge.”
Author:
Don Defreeze is a wilderness guide and owner of a guide service called
Exchiking in Roanoke, Virginia.
Appraisal:
It’s tough to figure out how many of my complaints and issues with
this book are valid complaints by any reasonable criteria and how much is “just
me” based on taste, misplaced expectations, or something else. I’ll talk about
them all and you can decide which might matter to you.
The first issue is the less than adequate copyediting and proofing job
this book received. It was clearly lacking in this regard with missing or wrong
words, homonym errors, and misspelled names, among other issues.
I also found the author’s writing style to be pretentious. It felt like
rather than attempting to communicate his thoughts as clearly as possible that
he instead wanted to impress someone by stringing together several obscure,
seldom used words in a row. To be clear, there was nothing wrong with any of
the words, but rather than using the perfect word to illuminate a thought more
clearly the overuse of these words obfuscated the message instead. Here’s an
example:
I can’t
help or hold back a teary-eyed reaction to the emotional euphoria the John
Denver song generates. While viewing the amazing scenery, my uplifted spirits
share a remorse for the irreparable failure of mine to journey out into this
realm during the lost, destitute years I spent filling the days subsisting
within the Human Tree. Even the thrust of late to catch up with the wilderness
experience has been besieged by economic objectives perceived to be more
important, and I hang the loss of adventure on being hood-winked into chasing
unessential goods.
Nothing wrong with any of those words, nor are any of them out of most
of our vocabulary, yet the way they’re strung together feels like a whole lot
of work to extract the meaning, at least to me. As a side-note, the long
chapters (at least they felt long) with very few breaks within the chapters to
create natural stopping points, gave me what I’ll call reader fatigue, trying
to get to a good stopping point.
Last, after reading the book, I’m still left uncertain what the
author’s message was intended to be. I’ve read literally hundreds of books
based on a travel experience, probably forty or fifty of them based on a hike
of some kind. These usually have two levels, the adventure of the experience
and the lessons the author learned from the experience. It was apparent from
the way this book is presented in its description that the author intended to
focus more on the latter than is typical for these books, and that’s okay. At
times I felt like I was being told what the lesson I should take away from the
story was, rather than the story leading me to figure it out on my own. At
other times I felt like I was completely missing the point. On this point,
possibly other readers would react much differently. I just know it didn’t work
for me.
Format/Typo
Issues:
Lots of copyediting and proofing issues that snuck through to the
published version. These include missing or wrong words, homonym errors,
misspelling of names (both people and song titles), and other sundry problems.
Rating: **
Two Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 80-85,000 words
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