Pilgrim's Wilderness

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER#5 on Amazon's Best 100 Books of the YearA Mother Jones Best Book of the YearAn Outside Best Adventure Book of the Year Extraordinary...Mr. Kizzia has done an outstanding job unpacking Pilgrim's story; the book is superbly researched, the writing clear and unflinching. -- Wall Street Journal Pilgrim's Wilderness is measured, painstakingly reported and gripping, giving us a true look at an escapist nightmare in America's mythic and fading frontier. -- Los Angeles Times Not since The Shining has family life off the grid seemed as terrifying as it does in Pilgrim's Wilderness, by Tom Kizzia, but this time the chills come from nonfiction. --Arts Beat, New York Times With even reporting and spare, lovely prose, Kizzia exposes the tyrannies of faith, and a family's desperate unraveling. It will make your skin crawl. -- The Daily Beast For those awaiting the next Jon Krakauer-esque classic, look to an Alaskan writer named Tom Kizzia... A gripping nonfiction thriller told with masterful clarity...I'm betting it will be the sleeper hit of the summer. Put it at the top of your stack. -- Outside Magazine Reads like a bewitching, brilliant novel... Even in the hands of a mediocre writer, this story would be mesmerizing. But Kizzia's gifts as a journalist and writer are such that it is a powerhouse of a book, destined to become a wilderness-tale classic like Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. On one level, it's a brilliant exploration of the kinds of frontier issues that most of America put away more than 100 years ago--rugged individualism vs. community cooperation and compromise, and wilderness harnessers vs. preservationists. But most and best of all, it is the story of how a pack of illiterate, brainwashed children came to realize that the man they looked up to as a god was actually a tyrant, and how they found the courage to break free. Here's to them, and to Kizziae