In the Eye of the Wild

2024 was for me a year of brilliant memoirs—I'll keep going back to A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, and I also enjoyed reading Clair Wills's Missing Persons, Or my Grandmother's Secret—but right at the very end of the year I received this as a late birthday present and my god did it not blow my mind. One heck of an opening, and it only gets better; cerebral, jaw-clenching, full of long beautiful ruminating passages about the body and what is left of it if half your face is eaten up by a bear. Also found the book to be a really good peek into how anthropologists think (something that ethnographies don't do imo, seduced as they are a little by the ethnographer's abstracted historical voice)