Book Read, 2008

"Strange Piece of Paradise" by Terri Jentz

In short, this book blew me away. It is the memoir of one of the survivors of a most bizarre camping attack on two young girls in 1977.

I can very much remember as a kid camping that my Dad had an acute need to scan the grounds for trucks that might "run us over". Now, if you aren't familiar with the incident which led to this fear practically nationwide, this sounds completely insane. And the weird thing is, those memories I had were just blips - I was too young to know where the fear came from.

Until I found this book in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. I could not get to the register with it fast enough. Here was something I am really interested in (crime) in book form, with an answer to a question I've had since I was a kid.

And here's the best part. This book is so majestically written, that you can't help but devour it whenever you get a chance.

I have a few phrases and bits from the book that normally I'd have put in a separate entry, but I think I'll just put them here:

"I was fixated only on the randomness of how we all could be taken out - the 'accidental' aspect of the incidents of fate, that something you could never invent in a fiction if you were plotting your own fate could happen from nothing and nowhere, even in the places that seemed most innocent."

"It was some kind of cosmic prank. Even the skeptic's eyes were widening."

"...I still needed evidence, data, constant confirmation of what I didn't want to believe -- that I shared human nature with people like him, who lived life guided by a spirit of perverseness, who did wrong for wrong's sake only."