“The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit” by Michael Finkel

Very mixed feelings about this book and its existence. It’s the story of a man who successfully lived in the woods for 27 years, as told by the journalist author. Fascinating and fun to read, but in the end it felt like a book filled with mostly unsympathetic people. The ‘hermit’, the people he burgled, the people who caught him, and most of all the author himself all did questionable things that made me go: eh... Christopher Knight was in his early twenties when he drove to the woods and was never heard from again. His camp was located close to a lake with lots of cabins, so he survived by burgling everything he needed from those homes: food, clothes, gear, building material, entertainment. It took almost three decades of effort and modernization of equipment before he was caught. It seems overboard how far they went: alarms, cameras, highly advanced border patrol technology, people staying up in cabins with weapons in wait, police running over there in the middle of the night at the…