Gone Boy: A Walkabout [Hardcover]

Gregory Gibson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

Ths story of a father's search for truth after his son's murder, "Gone Boy" offers a commanding inquiry into guns, violence, and manhood in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The recent rash of school shootings makes Gibson's heartbreaking book as timely as it is good. Shortly before Christmas in 1992, an alienated, angry student named Wayne Lo went on a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, wounding four people and killing two, one of whom was Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen. While grieving, Gibson embarked on what he calls a "walkabout," a search for the truth about his son's death: "I would concentrate on the details, the facts, and trust that their greater meaning would emerge, of its own accord, in the end. It never occurred to me to doubt that there was a greater meaning." At first, there was Lo's trial to occupy him, followed by a civil suit against the college. Gibson writes honestly about the rage that consumed him for the first few years after Galen's death. In a remarkable chapter, he describes a conversation with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, which owns Simon's Rock, in which he realized that assigning blame would serve no practical or spiritual purpose. Not that human fallibility didn't play a huge role in Galen's death: Gibson makes a compelling argument that Simon's Rock administrators had more than enough warning signs to prevent the tragedy. Lo's high-school teachers knew he was troubled. So did his college teachers. And his college friends and administrators knew he had a gun and ammunition. What makes this book special, and what distinguishes it from the blizzard of 30-second explanations and 800-word op-ed pieces on teen violence, is the way in which Gibson transcends his rage and becomes capable of mounting a searching, informative and ultimately deeply moving exploration into the combination of causality and randomness that surrounds his son's death.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

On December 14, 1992, during a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College, Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen, was shot and killed. In the aftermath, Gibson, an antiquarian bookseller in Gloucester, MA, embarked on this "walkabout" in order to make sense of his grief. His son's murder, he writes, was "a terrible blow and the greatest teaching the world had to offer. It was God's Will, but it had happened in the world and so it had causes....I figured out that if I concentrated on the worldly chain of causes I might finally work my way up to the God's Will part." In the course of his inquiry into guns, violence, privacy, and responsibility, Gibson decides that the real lesson is that we have to find forgiveness and "take the energy this horrible thing had released and turn it around somehow and send it back out there, clean, so the world might be a better place for it." An emotionally moving, important story; recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries.ARobert C. Jones, formerly of Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha America; 1ST edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568362927
• ISBN-13: 978-1568362922
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,392,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #96 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Current Events > Gun Control

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eloquent, honest, beautifully crafted and very timely., September 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Gone Boy: A Walkabout (Hardcover)

In 1999, this book could not be more a propos. . Goneboy succeeds on so many levels- it is a wonderful narrative, a love story, a crime novel, a revenge fantasy, an open-minded dialectic on guns and violence, and, even, as a detracting reader put it, an "angry journal." Of course anger permeates the story - Gibson's son has been murdered. But this anger is not self-righteous; rather, it is a catalyst for humor, insight, self-searching, and transformation.

What makes this book so compelling is that Gibson, as much he is willing to follow the momentum of his rage for long periods of time, has a keen enough mind to ultimately be conscious of the problems of living in anger. His interviews of the people familiar with the murder case may be motivated by obsessiveness but they are also learning experiences for him - and for the reader.

Gibson's writing is mellifluous and poetic, a rare example of non-fiction literature. His structure is remarkable in that it is unconventional, starting and stopping at different places, the whole while remaining seamless. I wish I could mention an aspect of the book that failed - if only to appear more objective - but none comes across that doesn't seem nit-picky or forced.

Gibson's exquisite candor- his ability to bare the painful truths of his sometimes nearly insane state of mind - is not alienating at all, rather, it helps to fully realize Gibson as a character and make it even easier to give the reader a chance to fully occupy his shoes. Gibson's love for his son, his anger, his sense of wit, his insanity, his catharsis, is, at least for a while, ours. His book is almost altruistic in that we benefit so much from his profound searching without having to suffer such a huge loss. I personally cannot even comprehend losing someone the way Gibson has but that did not prevent me from huge emotional upheaval and acquiring significant wisdom while reading this book. Which leads me to believe that it would be almost impossible for family survivors of gun violence - of which, unfortunately, there have recently been many - not to find anything in this book that might assist them in their own grieving process.

How does one deal with the juggernaut of feelings of injustice, rage, grief, loss, love, nausea, cynicism, and depression that ultimately follow senseless killings? Incredibly, this book seems to provide many answers.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing, July 7, 2000

By 

"kallah" (Springfield, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gone Boy: A Walkabout (Hardcover)

This is an excellent self-portrait of one man's reaction to the violent death of his son. Readers expecting a true crime book in the current fashion will be disappointed. There are no great revelations, no detectives working to break the case, no shocking photographs. That is both its strength and its weakness ... it is far more honest than most true crime books, far less likely to try to wrench emotional reactions out of the reader. On the other hand, wading through other people's grief is edifying, but exhausting.

I left Simon's Rock the year before the shooting. Nothing surprised me much in the parts of the book dealing directly with Simon's Rock; the administration's actions (or lack thereof), and perhaps not even the shooting itself. The school, as another reviewer noted, was very much a sealed organism and prone to sealing off against the unwanted. Wayne Lo and his friends (for whom the idea of shooting someone was a way of relieving stress, not something to be actually *done*) were reacting, I think, to just that tendency.

It should be noted that, as Gibson says at the end of the book, that Wayne's parents are suffering the worst. They have lost their son without losing him.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read, September 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Gone Boy: A Walkabout (Hardcover)

I was a friend of Galen's (Greg's son) at Simon's Rock. While this book was very helpful to me in filling in the details of the events that led up to Galen's murder, and in helping me confront my own issues of sadness and anger surrounding the issue, I feel this book is an important read for people who were not involved as well. I hope a lot of people read it. I hope the parents of children who have been victims of shootings around the country (there have been too many, Littleton sticks out because of the scale, but I recall the stories if not the towns of several more over the last 2-3 years...) also read it, and maybe it will help them, too... and give them an idea of quests they could embark upon to help them with their grief. I hope the public at large reads this book and understands that there are deep, complex stories behind every shooting spree that appears on the television news. Maybe this book will inspire more people to humanize these issues in the media and political arenas. Finally, I hope this book brings a little bit of my friend, Galen, to a world of readers who can glimpse just a bit of the person who was so prematurely taken from this world... (Note: I disagree with the reader who gave this book one star, it was not an angry book, though Greg does discuss his anger, and his personal psychological journey that is part of his overall "Walkabout"... and it is only as fragmented and uneven as the real-life story behind it, it is an honest approach, it is well written, and it works...)