Yearning Wild: Exploring the Last Frontier and the Landscape of the Heart

Glendon's down-to-earth writing style and his epic adventure story make this book an addictive page turner. Included is everything from running world class dog teams across the icy tundra, to sipping Kava in the South Pacific. Read it for yourself and find out what draws a man to Alaska.

What an honest and brave guy to write this book. Glendon Brunk, one of those ultra-manly men, writes so honestly about what it means to be a man in a world dominated by men, and how, through the amalgamating forces of pain and growing self-awareness, came to see a different way. It's a book set in Alaska, with all the raw power of conquering the wilderness and living wild, with facing grizzly bears and extreme cold, but it's really not about Alaska. It's about growth and coming into consciousness. It's about driving sled dogs competively and coming to realize that winning the world championship of sled dog racing - a feat akin to any great athletic endeavor - was empty. It was because of a single-minded obsession to win, to conquer, to be the best, to control, all the manly perceptions that have the world in so much trouble today. Yearning Wild is about one man coming to see his responsibility for wounding, not only himself, but women and children and the land. It's about awakening. This book is a brave beginning, and it needs to be out there. I - a man - would encourage every man, every woman to buy it and to pass it on. Because it's one of those books that's desparately needed for the times we live in. Do it, please.

This is a heartfelt account of one man's struggle to overcome the archetpe of the "tough guy" and to soften into a realization of the power of love. R. Glendon Brunk, who could be one of the men in Pam Houston's "Cowboys are my Weakness" , shares his life with us in an engaging way -- sometimes sad, often funny, always keeping my attention. I wish that every man I know, from my brother and my father, to my cousins, to all my male friends would read it, too. Our world needs to find a new way, a way that isn't hung up onto the patriarchal ways of domination, the raw male energy that , undirected, may turn so quickly to violence and destruction. And here's a guy who was one of the toughest (he admits that that was the way he thought he should be) who openly shares his journey to become open and loving - therefore ultimately stronger. This is a great book about gender issues. Men and women alike should read it, discuss it, let it inspire new paths, and greater connected-ness with eachother and the world around us.

Here's a book with the romanticism of Davy Crockett, weather the likes of A Perfect Storm, herds of caribou familiar through Never Cry Wolf, and a cast of sled dogs paling Lassie, Old Yeller, Sounder, and Where the Red Fern Grows. It's a book for children because of the raw adventure: watch our protagonist shoot a bear that's about to knock down his cabin door and eat his baby daughter (and then watch him leave, tossing his wife butchering instructions). Hear him call "Trail" as he and his sixteen world champions pass the favored dog team and head into Fairbanks and the crowd's cheers.It's a book for women because its central figure is the stuff of endless heartbreak: a doer, a pacifist, a romantic, a man with a guitar and songs and dreams as big as all outdoors, a man whose restlessness is the stuff (in women's eyes) of pathology. This man from Mars retreats not just to his cave; he moves to Fiji, to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Guatemala, Mexico, and Africa.It's a book for men because this writer lived most men's dreams. Brunk's woods were not Thoreau-sized; his peace required the presence of Alaskan wildlife which had never before seen a human. He yearned really wild, and, as Mary Renault says, "Longing performs all things." R. Glendon Brunk performed. It almost killed him. The real gifts in this amazing book are Brunk's courageous candor in addressing the essential emptiness he found once he realized his dreams. He does not flinch in the face of his paradoxes: he admits, for example - acknowledging a tension that must exist among almost all men -- that having a child was not in his dream. But this is a healing book. The adventure stories are only preliminary to Brunk's more central journey here: the one inward and the one backwards: back to the courage it takes to stay. Read this book. Give it to your husband, your son, your son's teacher, your ex-husband, your boss, your mailperson. This is a great book.