Customer Reviews

Raising Roger's Cross

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Bought this book because of the area I live in and being close to Foley for years. A little confusing in the beginning with so many personalities involved. Even though I was informed and was already familiar with this story I still found it shocking. This book will make me look differently at my neighbors and whom and what they may have done in their lifetimes. In a fury of frenzy humans can be quite destructive. Book was I thought well written by Father Kunkel and his views are well documented. I am now waiting for justice for Roger!

the book makes one think about personal actions and choices, good or bad. and even though i never knew him, his history has changed our line of history. Rest In Peace.

The 50's weren't all Happy Days, warm fuzzies, poodle skirts, the Cleavers and the Cunninghams. The 50's were also the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, and the killings In Cold Blood of the Clutter family in Kansas chronicled by Capote. Says Father Charles Kunkel, O.S.C., of Onamia, Minnesota: "The fifties are seen sometimes as the `good old days' before all Hell broke loose in the sixties. But sociologists will say that the fifties were more like the dammed up river of social changes generated by the upheavals of World War II. Changes of the sixties were already happening under the surface of the fifties. ... the wounds of hidden change were wreaking havoc." One incident of this havoc happened in the Kitten Club and a contiguous cornfield on the night of October 5 through 6, 1957, down near Long Siding, Minnesota. "Raising Roger's Cross" is Father Kunkel's quest to uncover occurrences in and around the mutilation and death of 17 year old Roger Vaillancourt, officially ruled an accident.

This True Crime book is unflinchingly graphic, deeply disturbing and depressing, and may not be for the faint of heart. But how else to convey the trauma and trenchant horror? Its mission is not to tell the entire story, as it is yet unknown, but rather to Raise Roger's Cross; hopefully, to encourage others to come forth with what they know: their little pieces of the puzzle; and to goad officialdumb out of their almost 50 year old "duck and cover"up mode. Now that Fr. Kunkel has let the KittenClub out of the bag, what are they going to do? For updates, go to his blog @ rogerscross.com. /TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer.

I picked up this book because not only am I from MN, I am also interested in true crimes.

This book was poorly written. A lot of information was repeated so much that I found myself skimming a lot of it. There was an overuse of certain terms and generalizations that grew weary quite quickly. This author jumped around so much that the book became very confusing.

One thing that bothered me immensely was how much this priest related everything to sex. While I have no doubt that sex probably was involved, I was frustrated that he seemed fixated on this one aspect, and revolved everything around it. He continuously connected alcohol and sex--and I think that would be an unfair generalization to the average alcoholic or person with depraved sexual issues--even though there can be a connection between the two. Before you think I am bashing Catholic priests, I need to tell you that I am a practicing Catholic, and have just not been exposed to priests this glib regarding sex. I have to admit that I began wondering what the author's real purpose was for writing this book. I would probably discourage him from writing another book. I believe he wants to show the connection of the crosses we all bear, but I don't believe this is the best way to do it. He probably also had some misguided sense of wanting to help the family deal with their loss, as well as to help them find some answers. However, I believe we don't always get our answers here on earth, no matter how badly we want them. I am not certain that the family found the answers they were looking for in this book, anyway.

When reading true crime books (or, honestly, any books), you have some authors giving a lot of graphic detail, and you have other authors who give less graphic details related to the crime, but more details about the solving of the mystery. I could have had a one or two sentence summary of what factually happened, and for those really interested in the true grit, maybe there could have been another sentence giving explicit "damages" (for lack of a better word!) to the body, and then moved on to the solving of the mystery. This guy speculated on what happened, actually explaining emotions of both the victim and the witnesses and perpetrators during the "incident"--something he couldn't possibly have known. It became more biographical fiction than anything.

Overall, the book smelled heavily of a poor conspiracy theory, and somebody who wanted to try his hand at writing.

Just awful.

Ludicrously horrible. Poorly sourced. Poorly written. Absurdly graphic about items for which there is no substantiation.

A shameful mess.

I was interested in the book because its where I was raised.What hurt were the fact that he only changed sime names.My Uncle is mentioned many times unflatteringly.He is reffered to as being openly gay,which he wasn't.It was very easy to figure out who all the suspects really were.I will be glad to name them if anyone wants to know.He should have changed all the names or not used just some of the last names.

I just completed Raising Roger's cross, and while I found the story interesting because of its nature, I found the writing style of the author disjointed and certainly not what I expected from a book marked Fiction. The book reads as a series of notes, somewhere in a confused neverland between non-fiction and fiction. There are brief histories of the individuals involved, which are restated many times throughout the book. Because of the nature of the death, no conclusions are reached and by the end the reader is even more confused than the Newspaper accounts of the story. This confusion is not simply because of the nature of the unsolved crime, it is a confusion brought on by the focus of the novel and the writer's style. Charles Kunkel moves in and out of preachy narrative to speculative comments about what Old timer's might have thought, or might not have thought, to judgemental comments concerning the town. I found the expression "Foley Youth" completely monotonous as well as the expression "Foley wild group", and I am not even from Foley. In the big picture, just how wild could the Rainbow cafe have been in comparison to other Den's of iniquity in larger cities? The Rainbow was just a small hole in the wall cafe, downtown Foley, where people from all groups gathered to discuss what was happening in Foley. Probably every town within driving distance that had a population between 500 and l,000 people had their own Rainbow, Dew Drop Inn or Main street cafe. It certainly wasn't a place where you would expect anyone to sell Heroin or find a prostitute for the evening! And as for underaged drinking at the cafe, there was probably more drinking openly going on at the local church bazaar. I guess I would really resent the comments if I had been a regular at the cafe or related to the owner.

I also had no clue about why the author's religious goal is to "raise more stories about the cross" and if he does, I hope he finds a new voice and style before starting another Author House project. If Kunkel wanted to explore small town mentality and how a closed minded,practically one church steeple community often ignored proper police investigative techniques in the 50's, and fabricated data based on what someone might have said to someone else, he would have had a stronger focus. To me, this is a story about a typical small, close minded community in the 50's whose young people had very little to do other than go to dances and drink, which in itself was the tragedy. Raising Roger's Cross reads like a peep show that gives us a small glimpse into the lives of a group of aging teenagers playing telephone. As in most small towns, anything out of the ordinary gets blown completely out of proportion, and a death of a high school student would have brought out all the local gossip even if there was no murder and no "wild group" conspiracy to cover up Mack and Dewey's deeds.

I have no doubt that something did occur that night. My guess is there was a lot of underaged drinking and a fight. This fight probably involved Mack and Dewey, and the girls in question probably saw parts of it or knew it had occured. What bothers me the most is that the book is too close to non-fiction for comfort. I do not blame reviewers for being upset when some real people's names are mentioned as openly Gay, or characterized as wild or bad people etc. If I were one of the woman characterized in the book, I would certainly not be pleased with local gossip and speculations over my supposed sexual misconduct. I realize the author was attempting to right a wrong, but the book would have been better written as completely Fictional. I'm quite frankly surprised that somebody hasn't complained to a lawyer.

While the subject matter interested me, this book was written in such a style that I found it very difficult to stay interested. I felt it was very poorly written. The over-use of certain phrases, the format (what was up with that?)... just everything. I got to the point that I didn't really even know what the point of the book was. I'm very surprised it's rated as highly as it is. It's simply not a good book.