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STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE

Name: STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE
Author: Terri Jentz
ISBN: 0-374-13498-7

by Terri Jentz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2006

An emotional piece of investigative work, vitiated in places by prolixity and psycho-clichés.

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Attacked while asleep in a tent during a cross-country bicycle trip, the author returned to Oregon years later to investigate the crime and to search for the assailant, who was never apprehended.

The June 22, 1977, attack was grisly. A man drove his pickup through the tent, backed over Jentz and her college roommate Shayna, then went after them with an axe. The author, now a screenwriter, did not see the attacker’s face, only his oddly neat cowboy attire. Shayna, who sustained a life-threatening head wound, continues to have no memory of the assault. Jentz is relentless in her pursuit of Dirk Duran (a name that, like others in this account, she has changed), a strikingly handsome but volatile young man who lived near the crime scene, a roadside park called Cline Falls. Some local people suspected Duran because of his unstable, abusive behavior, but, for reasons that the author explores, the police did not investigate him closely. Jentz did. With the help of two committed friends, she interviewed many who knew Duran, including co-workers, relatives and women he’d abused. Eventually, she pieced together not only the details of the crime but also Duran’s twisted, vicious history. In one striking scene, years after the attack, Jentz goes to watch Duran’s trial on another charge. (The statute of limitations had expired in her own case.) He knows she’s been on his trail, and their eyes meet. The author is meticulous about detail; she read countless newspaper articles, court and hospital documents; she drove up lonely, remote roads to find people who might provide only a single nail for the edifice she was erecting. But her overlong account should have been substantially trimmed, and the frequent passages of pop psychology are amateurish.

An emotional piece of investigative work, vitiated in places by prolixity and psycho-clichés.

Pub Date: May 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-374-13498-7

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)