Book Review: Jungle by Yossi Ghinsberg

Have you ever done something stupid? Like, really stupid? Maybe it crept up on you while you were doing it, maybe it still felt right. But at some point you start to tell someone about it, and as you explain it you think "Wow, that was really stupid!". Did that ever happen to you?

Hold that thought!

Jungle by Yossi Ghinsberg is the true story of the time Yossi spent lost and for a while on his own in the Amazon Rainforest. Of the three other people who took the trip with him, two have never been heard from again. Yossi survived lack of food, a prowling jaguar, nasty infections on his feet, and a vicious insect swarm that attacked him when he was sleeping and too weak to move. Yossi spent weeks in the jungle, with a total of 17 days all alone - the time alone was so great that rescuers were about to give up, thinking nobody could survive that.

Now I love a good survival story. I absolutely loved Lone Survivor and Endurance among others, and what Yossi did was no less amazing than what others were able to do. In fact, in some sense it's even more amazing, since Yossi wasn't a Navy SEAL or a professional explorer - he was a young adult backpacking through South America.

That's an incredible story. And reading this should have filled me with wonder. Instead, I kept shaking my head and saying "What an idiot!"

Let's talk about how Yossi got in the jungle in the first place. Yossi met (as in, he had never seen this man before) a guy named Karl right outside his residence in Bolivia one day. Karl said he was leading a mining expedition and wanted to pay Yossi and some of his friends to accompany him on the expedition so he would have some other westerners to talk to. Yossi and two friends agreed and started getting ready for the trip. One day before they were going to leave, Karl said the mining expedition was cancelled, and he would need to drive a truck up to his uncle's ranch in Argentina instead; however, if Yossi and his friends paid Karl to lead their expedition, he could tell his uncle he had a job and would have to visit him later in the year. Yossi and friends agreed, and the jungle trip went on.

Let me summarize - someone they never met said he would pay Yossi and friends to go into the jungle with him, then at the last minute asked them to pay him. Does that sound like a good decision to you?

I don't know if there's cultural differences because Yossi is Isreali, or because he was a backpacker, or maybe Yossi was just a trusting person, but Karl's deception doesn't get nearly the suspicion that it should have raised in the book - and, of course, in real life they still trusted him. You're never going to believe this but Karl turned out to not be who he said he was. It's lucky for Yossi and Kevin (the other survivor) that this didn't turn out worse than it did, as at least Karl really did know how to navigate the jungle.

I will also say that, while it's good to have Yossi's authoritative point of view, he's not really a strong writer - this book really could have benefited from a ghostwriter.

So, a bit of a disappointment overall - six out of ten hot dogs.