the stranger in the woods by michael finkel

The book doesn’t penetrate the mystery of Knight’s renunciation, but the questions it raises remain deeply compelling. Yet even as Finkel immerses himself in Knight’s life-researching hermits, consulting psychologists, even camping at Knight’s hideaway-his subject’s motivations remain obscure, leaving the book somehow incomplete. A fellow outdoorsman, Finkel places Knight in the long tradition of hermits, a category that has been admired and distrusted over the centuries.

©2017 Michael Finkel (P)2018 Audible, Ltd. Above all, this is a deeply moving portrait of a man determined to live life his own way. Despite frequent rebuffs, enough of a relationship developed for Finkel to broadly outline Knight’s wilderness solitude. The Stranger in the Woods is a riveting story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude and what makes for a good life. Drawn by the details that followed Knight’s arrest, Finkel reached out to him through letters and visits. Finally apprehended during one of his raids, the “Hermit of North Pond” battled depression and contemplated suicide as he was forced to rejoin society. To survive, Knight relentlessly pilfered supplies from vacation houses around his campsite, infuriating and terrifying homeowners and baffling a generation of cops. In this fascinating account of Knight’s renunciation of humanity, Finkel ( True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa) struggles to comprehend the impulses that led Knight to court death by hypothermia even though his family home was less than an hour’s drive away.

This romantic figure, this mysterious man who had abandoned society for the forest, was nothing more than a common thief, stealing blocks of cheese and packages of bacon from little kids. But there are inconsistencies in Knight’s story. Nearly three decades passed before he reappeared and revealed he’d spent most of that time camping in the woods of central Maine. The Stranger in the Woods is involving and well-told it certainly casts its spell. On a summer morning in 1986, 20-year-old Christopher Knight didn’t show up for his job installing alarm systems in Waltham, Mass.

The stranger in the woods by michael finkel