Finkel's True Story (2005) mixed journalism and memoir and was made into a movie in 2015. Here, Finkel investigates Christopher Knight, who in 1986, at 20, walked into the woods of central Maine and stayed for 27 years. Knight maintained a strict moral code yet sustained himself by repeatedly burglarizing lake cottages and a nearby summer camp. He took only what he needed and shocked police with his crime-scene neatness and repair of the doors and windows he jimmied open. Aside from nearly deadly winters, Knight led an easy life in the woods, reading, listening to radio, and even enjoying a five-inch TV. Upon capture and incarceration, he became depressed, which, when he was set free, worsened as he struggled to reassimilate. Most clinicians doubt that Knight's hermit behavior was due to a medical condition, and he seems stable at the book's end. Some people empathize with Knight, but many cottage owners in his crime zone suffered understandable trauma. Big-budget promotion and the intriguingly unusual subject should create strong demand.--Carr, Dane Copyright 2017 Booklist

Christopher Knight lived for 27 years in the woods of Maine with almost no human interaction, surviving by pilfering food and supplies. Opening with the account of how Knight was captured by an ex-marine after stealing from a local camp, this book begins on an exciting note, though the pace slows as Finkel weaves in research about the science of isolation along with an exploration of the philosophical and nature writing that might lead someone like Knight to seek seclusion. An extension of Finkel's 2014 GQ article "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit," this title goes into detail about the lengths to which Knight went in order to stay alive. Teens who are drawn to survival stories will appreciate reading about the harsh conditions Knight faced, including freezing weather, isolation, and lack of food, and the problem-solving skills on which he had to rely. This introspective look at the hermit life throughout time focuses on the ethical issues involved in one man's attempt to break free of society. VERDICT Hand this volume to mature and thoughtful teens who love Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild or are interested in philosophy, science, or nature.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

On a summer morning in 1986, 20-year-old Christopher Knight didn't show up for his job installing alarm systems in Waltham, Mass. Nearly three decades passed before he reappeared and revealed he'd spent most of that time camping in the woods of central Maine. 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. To survive, Knight relentlessly pilfered supplies from vacation houses around his campsite, infuriating and terrifying homeowners and baffling a generation of cops. Finally apprehended during one of his raids, the "Hermit of North Pond" battled depression and contemplated suicide as he was forced to rejoin society. Drawn by the details that followed Knight's arrest, Finkel reached out to him through letters and visits. Despite frequent rebuffs, enough of a relationship developed for Finkel to broadly outline Knight's wilderness solitude. A fellow outdoorsman, Finkel places Knight in the long tradition of hermits, a category that has been admired and distrusted over the centuries. 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. The book doesn't penetrate the mystery of Knight's renunciation, but the questions it raises remain deeply compelling. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

When Christopher Knight was 20 years old, he quit his job, drove into rural Maine, left his car on the side of the road, and simply walked into the woods. That was 1986. In 2013, after 27 years of living as a hermit, he was arrested while breaking into a building to get food. Finkel (True Story: Murder, Memoir, and Mea Culpa) covers Knight's nearly three decades of living entirely outdoors in the Maine woods. To survive, Knight broke into nearby cabins more than 1,000 times and stole what he needed, including food, beverages, and propane. The book examines the history of solitude and hermits worldwide, including the benefits and severe effects of living alone. The trial of Knight is brief, and the aftermath creates great tension for the listener. Mark Bramhall narrates with his usual talent. His reading of quotes from Knight, who has a slow, gravelly New England accent, brings the listener fully into both the story and the freezing environment. VERDICT Fans of Finkel and anyone who has ever thought about walking away from life and living as a hermit will find a wealth of entertaining knowledge here. Highly recommended. ["With inevitable comparisons to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, this book will appeal to recreational readers interested in outdoor adventure, survival stories, or escaping the mainstream": LJ 11/15/16 review of the Knopf hc.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

MICHAEL FINKEL is eating breakfast when a hermit jumps out of his newsfeed and into his heart. The hermit's name is Christopher Knight, and he would still be living undisturbed in the Maine woods had he not been caught stealing junk food from a summer camp kitchen one night. With neatly cropped hair and wearing dad jeans and glasses, Knight doesn't look very hermit-y, but he confesses to burglarizing camps, cabins and houses about 40 times a year for as long as he's lived in the woods. And just how long is that? the cops ask. Knight has to think. "What year was the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster?" Finkel, a journalist based in Montana, feels two things reading this local news story gone viral. The first is a need to know how someone could survive 27 years in the wild without death or detection. The second is kinship. Finkel presents himself as an introvert, an outdoorsman and the survivor of a 10-day silent retreat in India, among other spirit-seeking adventures. "The hermit appeared to have the same passions on an exponentially grander scale," he writes. "I thought about Knight as I vacuumed the breakfast crumbs, and I thought about him as I paid bills in my office. I worried that someone with no immunity to our lifestyle, physically or mentally, was now being exposed to all our germs." After several admiring letters, and a few not entirely truculent jailhouse responses, Finkel shows up uninvited for visiting hours, and "The Stranger in the Woods" launches on its short, short, short way. You may have noticed some repetition in that sentence. That's because "The Stranger in the Woods" started as a 2014 GQ magazine article, and its journey to a petite 200-page book is similar to the one a meatball takes on its way to becoming a meatloaf. There's something tasty here. There's also a good deal of filler. At the jail, Finkel optimistically registers as a friend of the prisoner. He may as well be a torturer registering as a masseuse. Knight scowls through the partition glass at a point somewhere over the author's shoulder, refusing eye contact or acknowledgment. "Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me," Finkel writes a little despondently. But what the hermit lacks in warmth he makes up for in self-awareness. Knight: "Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home." Finkel: "Your hermit home - like under a bridge?" Knight, after a Gene Wilder-worthy comedic pause: "You're thinking of a troll." Finkel shrewdly plays the punching bag while Knight alternates between jabs and details. We learn that the hermit had never spent a night in a tent before his abrupt departure from society at age 20, and that much of his survival depended on a miraculously hidden campsite. Tticked behind a tangle of brush and wind-breaking boulders, he spent decades just three minutes from the nearest cabin: "Towns and roads and houses surround his site; he could overhear canoeists' conversations on North Pond. He wasn't so much removed from humanity as sitting on the sidelines." Finkel camped at the site and tells Knight he was enchanted by its tranquillity, to which the hermit responds : "Do you think 1 was engaging in feng shui?" Once settled in, Knight treated the mostly empty vacation homes around him, as Finkel puts it, like his "own private Costco." He slept under a camouflage canopy on a twin-size mattress with fitted sheets and Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases. There was Purell by the portable cooler. Wildlife was abundant, but he preferred peanut butter, frozen burgers and, above all, sweets. In a survey of the damage to nearby cupboards and psyches, Finkel notes, "One kid lost all his Halloween candy; the Pine Tree Camp was short an industrial-sized tub of fudge." Knight also stole epic quantities of books, and he roars to life through his taste. He quotes Freud, Marx and Woody Allen, and recognizes himself in the narrator of Dostoyevsky's "Notes From the Underground." His fetish for stillness results in a fondness for Emily Dickinson. He hates Thoreau ("a dilettante") and fans of Kerouac, and may be the first person to have followed through on a threat to use John Grisham novels as toilet paper. Through culture and his opinions of it, Knight stayed in touch with the world and categorized it, without the vulnerability of human engagement. He was the Holden Caulfield of the woods. Which is not to say he lacked perspective. Knight swears he suffered no childhood trauma. His family, which never reported him missing, was flinty, self-reliant and "obsessed with privacy." ("They assumed I was off doing something on my own.") He didn't choose to become a hermit - he was born one, and the woods gave him exactly what he sought. "Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable, I can't dismiss that idea," Knight says. "Solitude increased my perception. But here's the tricky thing: When I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for.... To put it romantically, I was completely free." In one of their sweeter exchanges, relayed in an epilogue on his reporting methods, Knight calls Finkel his Boswell and tells him he likes long books. Finkel admits that his will probably be short - and it should have been shorter. Only in the epilogue do we learn that author and subject had just nine one-hour prison meetings. It's the kind of thing readers should know earlier, especially since the poverty of access leads to some bad decisions. In a search for more motive and meaning than the hermit will provide, Finkel chats with psychologists who never met Knight, a seeming violation of psychiatry's Goldwater Rule against diagnosing people from afar. There are also honkingly dull digressions into the spiritual meaning of becoming a hermit ("In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a hermit"), some pseudoscience about solitude and brain function, and an unfortunate comparison with prisoners in solitary confinement, who hardly have the luxury of choosing their solitude. All this seems like obvious padding, but to give Finkel the benefit of the doubt, it may simply be that his affinity for his amazing hermit got the best of him. He does a remarkable job persuading one of the world's more recalcitrant individuals to open up, but Finkel wants more, and it's strange that he doesn't recognize Knight's limitations. At one of their last meetings, when a wall no longer separates them, the journalist asks the hermit to shake hands. "I'd rather not," Knight replies. ? JOSH TYRANGIEL is the executive vice president of news at Vice.

A journalist's account of a Massachusetts man who went deep into the Maine woods to live a life of solitude and self-sufficiency.While scanning the news online, Finkel (True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, 2005) came across the story of Christopher Knight. Police officers had arrested Knight for burglary, but when they questioned him further, they discovered that their suspect had been living alone in the wild for 27 years. Fascinated, the author sought out the "North Pond hermit" to learn why he had turned his back on society and understand the challenges he now faced with reintegration. Knight's boyhood and adolescence had been ordinary; his most outstanding traits were his shyness and penchant for solitude. Then, when he was 20, he suddenly quit his job. Without saying a word to friends or family, he went on a road trip that eventually led him to the shores of Moosehead Lake in Maine. There, he parked his car and, carrying only a backpack and a tent, "stepped into the trees and walked away." Knight built a shelter deep in the woods, where he camped outdoors even during the bitterest of Maine winters. He broke into nearby cottages, where he stole only what he needed to survive, including food, clothing, and magazines. His burglariesfor which he admitted feeling "ashamed"frightened residents at first. However, over time, many became used to his "visits" and even tried to leave out supplies for him to take. Through interviews conducted with the elusive Knight and those who knew him, Finkel creates a sympathetic portrait of a gentle yet quietly troubled man who willingly chose a Spartan existence in nature as a way to find the peace and freedom that eluded him in society. The narrative that emerges from Finkel's compassionate research not only probes the nature of the relationship between the individual and society, but also ponders the meaning of happiness and fulfillment in the modern world. A thoughtful, honest, and poignant portrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.