Freedom

March 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.

April 15, 2021
Journalist and filmmaker Junger (Tribe, 2016) returns to the fertile ground of male camaraderie and the pushing of limits. This time, instead of Afghanistan, the setting is closer to home. Junger, his dog, and unnamed comrades (including two Afghan war vets), test themselves ("we couldn't take anything from anyone except water and good advice") during a 400-mile trek through the former frontier and wilderness of Pennsylvania. According to Junger, the land alongside the railroad tracks by the Juniata River is probably some of the least-monitored land in the country. Like fugitives, vagabonds, or soldiers, the men grow to rely solely on each other in conditions reminiscent of combat, while sleeping "under bridges and in abandoned buildings and in the woods and on golf courses," all while avoiding the law. 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. Similar territory is covered in Junger's documentary, The Last Patrol (2014).

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