Customer Reviews

Strange Piece of Paradise

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is an incredible read!

Even if the story were lacking, which it certainly isn't, Terri Jentz skillfull and honest re-telling of the events that forever altered and in many ways shaped the rest of her life could make up for it. But instead this book, 542 pages of very closely typed small print, is worth a thousand pages of raw emotion that left me feeling that it had been under, rather than overstated.

Page by page, the author takes you on a tour of her life from age 19, when as a college student at Yale, she and her roommate Shayna undertake a cross-country bicycle ride. Beginning and ending in Oregon, the summer-long excursion ends in a mere 7 days when an axe-wielding maniac first drives over the tent as the girls lie at camp sleeping, and then hacks and carves into them before returning to his truck and driving away.

The girls live, but Terri tells the story, detail by detail, and as a reader, I sensed that I too was on that bike ride, in the tent, and almost twenty years later, re-tracing both the steps leading up to the attack and the attack itself. But even more compelling is that the way Terri tells her story, all emotion is felt, including not only the fear and terror, but the emotionally blank periods in Terri's life in which, to cope with the horror, she had shut out her ability to sense the reality of what had happened to her as she related her experience to friends and acquaintences as if it were a piece of amusing fiction.

Finally, coming to grips with the knowledge that she had "disassociated with the self in the sleeping bag that night" in order to survive it emotionally, Terri sets out not only to retrace her steps in hope of regaining her lost emotions, but also, to discover the identity of her would-be murderer and the incredulity of a small town that knew so much more about what happened to her than she did herself.

This is a book that you wont want to put down until it is finished. It is not light reading, but told with such skill and honesty, it goes much more quickly than expected. Don't read it caffienated!

To Terri Jentz, Oregon is a dark and strange piece of paradise. After her freshman year at Yale, Jentz and her roommate Shayna set off on a summer 1977 Great American Journey--crossing the country from Oregon to Virginia on a BikeCentennial route. On Day 22 of the journey, Jentz and Shayna separated from a couple they had met on the road and then decided to stop for the night in an unapproved campground. They awoke that night to the unimaginable horror of a pickup truck driving through their tent, and then a handsome phantom of a cowboy striking them repeatedly with an axe.

Jentz was physically damaged by the event, but she moved on with her life as a woman unafraid of telling her story, unafraid of the dark, and still willing to tent-camp. Her companion Shayna had amnesia about the night and barely survived with limited vision. She distanced herself from Jentz and the memories of that night as much as possible.

Fifteen years later, Jentz returned to Cline Falls, Oregon to investigate her past. "Could I ever apply meaning to what had long seemed a senseless act, one that happened without pattern or reason?" "Who was the man who emerged that night in a desert park, bent on destruction?" The statute of limitations on attempted murder in Oregon was a mere three years, so Jentz's adult odyssey was truly a personal exploration, not a formal legal investigation. In Orgeon, Jentz teamed up with victim's rights advocate Dee Dee, who puts it best: "We kind of reward you because you're not very good at what you do. The only difference between attempted murder and murder is that somebody was inadequate in what they tried to do. Their intent was the same. That person is as great a danger to society as the person who completed the murder. Maybe they're a bad shot. Why would you reward them?"

It was the lack of formal legal recourse that allowed Jentz access to the close-knit community of Cline Falls. Over the course of a decade, she traveled to Oregon repeatedly to chase down leads, interview police, talk to witnesses, and re-unite with her rescuers and with the hospital staff who cared for her. The girls "who got chopped up at Cline Falls" were ingrained in the collective memory of Oregonians and the nation, and everyone had a flicker of recognition when Jentz identified herself. She quickly discovered that the town had long suspected one of their own, an alcoholic, abusive sadist with a long history of domestic violence, as the perpetrator. He even had a nickname--Dick Duran the Hatchet Man. In candid prose, Jentz describes the bureaucratic mistakes made in the investigation of her case (it became a turf war between three local agencies), as well as the 1977 public relations nightmare of talking about two girls who "asked for it" by camping alone in an unapproved area, and the face of crime in the 1970's (the term serial killer hadn't even been invented yet, and there were no crime tabloids and TV shows).

Despite the inconsistencies and missteps Jentz discovered in the official investigation, nothing about the case is open and shut. Jentz finds witnesses who contradict one another, who contradict previous statements, and people who made claims but have been influenced by the gossip around town in the two decades since the crime. Her research is exhaustive, and she accepts nothing at face value. The author should be commended for her dedication to factual accuracy (she refused to accept hearsay); however, the extreme detail does weigh the action down partway through the book. As an armchair detective, I would have gladly accepted a more condensed version of interviews. This is still, without question, a 5-star narrative that succeeds both as a personal memoir and as a criminal case study.

I wanted to like this book, but it falls far short of what it could have been. It is too long by half -- it's a bad sign when readers (such as this one) are eager for a book to end, instead of hoping it never does. It is filled with cliche, bathos, and endless repetition.

What happened to Jentz is horrible, and she's to be commended for surviving and, now, thriving, in whatever way worked for her. She's to be commended for recognizing and naming her attack as, essentially, a (misogynist) hate crime.

Sadly, that doesn't make the book worth reading.

I picked up this book after seeing several very good reviews. While it's not the kind of thing I normally read and I was a bit wary of the length, I'm very glad I gave it a chance. Jentz is a brave and beautiful writer. The book works on so many levels. It's the investigation of a crime, but it's so much more. Jentz wrestles with an American ethos that glorifies violence and refuses to acknowledge the suffering of women. I know, that makes the book sound stuffy. But the author isn't writing a polemic. This is a very personal story, an attempt to recover a part of herself that was lost during the attack. There's a lot of detail and some very hard, dark material. In the end, though, I just couldn't stop reading, pulled along by the evolving mystery of who the perp was, and also the very touching story of the author's attempt to face the horror. Given the themes, the story, and the intense writing, I couldn't put the book down.

I am not normally a "true crime" or even a "memoir" lover, but this is a remarkable book. In my opinion, the book works well on three different levels:

First, it is a gripping, page-turning, dectective story with the twist that the investigation is taking place fifteen years after the crime and the victim is pursuing the criminal. Second, it is an important exaimination of the effects of voilence on our communities and an expose of our ineffective criminal justice system. Finally, the book is a powerful study of identity, an unusual "coming of age" story that takes place over thirty years. The author was deeply traumatized by her random brush with death. I found her struggle to integrate and make sense of this senseless act very moving.

This is a complex book and undoubtedly it will provoke comdemnation from some who disagree with its premisees or who do not "get" its introspective components. The author challenges conservative notions by powerfully revealing the pervasiveness of violence against women in our culture, and challenges liberal naivete about forgiveness and reformation of criminal minds. This book grapples with important issues and I hope it provokes some much needed national discussion.

This review is not particularly objective; Terri is a friend, and my parents play a supporting role in her tale. However, rather than coloring my judgement, I believe my familiarity with Terri and my family's experience as victims of crime gives me a unique vantage point for reviewing the book. Terri captures the complexity and nuances of the effects of trauma. Most importantly, her work is profoundly honest and genuine. I watched her go through this process for over a decade. Her book is the real deal.

i came to this book with high hopes and a vested interest, because in 1978, i also biked across the u.s.; i went solo and finished in lincoln city, oregon--a journey of over 2800 miles. i was always aware of the ominous threat of danger lurking--a careless motorist, perhaps a thief in the night. one thing i learned was that sleeping in town parks was far safer and more comfortable than finding bikecentennial approved campgrounds which tended to be near swamps filled with mosquitoes; i always cherished my privacy in these well-manicured parks in small towns; i also depended on the kindness of strangers--for food, water, even lodging at times. now onto her book:

it's a cyclist's worst nightmare what she went through; i grieved for her and her riding companion. she initially tells the story skillfully, but after the third, fourth, fifth, time, i grew weary of her obsessive need to replay the details; if she was aiming for the rashomon effect, she failed; her search to find out what really happened and why she and her riding partner were nearly hacked to death fit squarely into the post-traumatic stress syndrome category--and i could see why it took her 15 years to finally confront the demons that haunted her. but for the reader, her rehashing of the same details made me think of what a shrink goes through listening to his patient repeat the same tragic story each and every session. if only this book had been pruned by say 200 pages, it would have been a taut read; yet, she wanted to get each and every detail, each and every conversation down verbatim, and it just really weighted down her story. at times, her narrative soars--as she weaves together other henious crimes against women that took place in the late 70s. but when she struts forward with her yale-inspsired socio-feminism, i want to yawn. and the constant refrain and repitition of that night--the truck, the bloody tent, the axe man, the coeds--it was all too much to read it over and over again.
curiously, for a book about self-discovery, much about her personal life is ommitted. she's cagey here; she had a romantic crush on her gal pal; this is the real axle upon which the story revolves--and her years of guilt and questioning revolve around. there's an immutable law about bike touring: don't carry extra weight, only keep what is necessary. jettison the excess baggage. for all its flashes of insight, nimble sleuthing, and harrowing story arc, the author would have benefited by traveling light.

bill katovsky
co-author of "bike for life: how to ride to 100"

The story of the vicious attack in rural Oregon of two women bicycling across the US the summer after the country's bicentennial celebration by an unknown and never apprehended man forms the foundation of the book. From that horrific event, the author describes her years of emotional numbness and denial until, when she finds herself finally ready, she returns to the scene of the crime to try to determine who her attacker was. She very bravely shares her obsession with the search for her perpetrator, her relationships with people she meets along the way, her slow process of emotional recovery, and her own shortcomings, including her tendency to redundancy and endless rumination in her writing. She very honestly describes what is was like for her to live her life as a victim while fighting the urge to behave like one. Without naming it, she reveals the stubbornness in her personality which allowed her to survive the attack, recover her physical health, and then rebuild her sense of competence as a free agent to shape her own life. And her account transcends the personal to examine the rudimentary state of law enforcement investigation in rural Oregon at the time, attitudes towards women in the urban Northeast US versus the rural setting of Oregon, the beginning of the crime victims movement, and other socially relevant themes. Others have mentioned here that it is a long book, and I agree that it is a bit too long and not as well edited as it might have been. In her afterword she mentions that even at the current length it is substantially pared down from her original manuscript. I am a great fan of writing as a mode of healing, and it seems pretty clear that this book served that purpose for Jentz. And while that kind of writing does not always make for the most polished or literary prose, nor does it necessarily make for well-shaped plots or entirely satisfying character development, it still affords a wonderful privilege for the reader looking to witness another person's growth.

I wish I liked this book more than I did. I was intrigued by the premise, and the critical attention paid to the book. Jentz does a wonderful job of making characters memorable, and the way her understanding of Oregon evolves over the course of her search is vivdly evoked, as is the feeling that anything can happen at anytime. Jentz is also skilled at drawing out the significance of the multitudinous ways lives intersect in often random, but occasionally synchronistic patterns.

My feeling after finishing the book--it was indeed compulsively readable; I gulped it down rather than reading it--was that I had no real feeling or sympathy for the narrator, the author herself. I was swept away by the mystery of her case, but in the end, I found the way she portrayed herself problematic. For instance, in the scene when she is telling her friend the horrid details of their shared experience, she never reflects on the possibility that she is inflicting a cruelty upon this young woman she claimed to love, a woman whose defense mechanisms radically differed from the author's. As someone who teaches nonfiction writing, including memoir and crime writing, I wish Jentz had been pushed by an editor or mentor to put her own experience into a deeper context, one that included others who experienced harrowing escapes all over the country, indeed the world, and a more mature understanding of her own behavior.

Mary Roach's review in The New York Times asks the reader to imagine Truman Capote in Jentz's position; I would like to read what Joan Dideon would weave of this experience had she lived through it. What Jentz accomplishes is a personal healing, yes, but her understanding of the social conditions in which she operates is limited to the worldview of the 19 year old she was when the trauma occured, as if her capacity for self reflection and understanding of herself in historical and sociological context is fossilized, forever doomed to the adolescent development stage. That is a shame for someone so clearly capable of flashes of external description and insight so piercing and true as Jentz clearly is.

To leave a reader unmoved by little but the vicarious thrill of hunting down a criminal, as if watching an episode of "Law and Order," is perhaps itself an act of cruelty inflicted on an audience that expects more from FSG, a publishing house that purports to uphold the finest literary standards. In the end, Jentz's book will end up on the dusty shelves with other long-forgotten, self-absorbed memoirs that sadly will not endure the real tests of time passed by such true-crime classics as In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, and memoirs like James Ellroy's My Dark Places, and Mikal Gilmore's Shot Through the Heart.

I had high hopes for this book after hearing Ms. Jentz interviewed. Unfortunately, it's mostly just navel-gazing. Her thoughts and feelings might hold my interest -- if they had been focused enough.

This book has an intriguing story to tell: the attack on Ms. Jentz and her friend, their reasons for riding across America, and Ms. Jentz's later search for the perpetrator and the reasons the case was never solved. Unfortunately, the book is very heavily burdened with navel gazing and overwrought prose. This would have been a nice, tight story at 200 pages. At 500, it's bloated. An editor is desperately needed.

Large portions of the book seem to be virtually lifted verbatim from the author's journals. We find out how she feels about EVERYTHING that happens. You get to hear about every little gesture and movement as if they are important. I don't care what evil portent for the future is contained in the color of a road sign. Everything is burdened with dense discussion of feelings and everything seems to portend ... something -- virtually always (of course: 99%+ of life is just happenstance) leads nowhere and is never mentioned again.

Here are some examples:

Navel gazing:
"Rather, because I wanted her to pay attention; I wanted her to reach in and touch me in response to this life-changing event. (And anyway, hadn't she helped save me too? Without her energizing presence fighting for life, I might have bled to death in that place.) No. It wasn't about the saving. I wanted her to let me into her psyche, as she had lodged in mine. Something, however small, was missing in the room that night -- an unrequited something or another -- a missing moment that followed me with the fidelity of a shadow for a very long time." (p. 106) (Gaaaakkk!)

Overwrought prose:
"The desert is a holy void, all essentials burned away. It has a presence as powerful as the ocean, a raw force that acts on us, puts us under the influence of what we cannot control." (p. 70) What does this have to do with the story? Has she read The Desert (Van Dyke), Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Arabian Sands, or even the Bible?

"Perhaps a fascination with transgressive excess, our seduction by the spectacle of power, goes some distance in explaining why Americans are in swoon, why the movies, books, and popular music dwell on criminals, particularly killers of the serial or mass-murdering variety." (p. 158) Please!

So much of this stuff is larded amongst the story, I just stopped caring after a while. These kind of things have to comprise at least 50% of the book. Some entire chapters are made up of this. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs all the time (oh God, more of that!).

So, you're thinking, oh, he's just a MAN, they have no feelings and don't care about feelings. Well, no. I like a good, emotionally charged book. However, I don't care to hear about how she felt when remembering how she felt at age 4 when she found her pet beetle dead. I read many sections of this book aloud to my wife and she thought them ludicrous.

If you enjoy slogging through another's every little emotion and thought, regardless of relevance, you may enjoy this book. Maybe it's therapeutic self-help for some traumatized readers. But for me, the story just gets lost in the mess.

I just finished reading In Cold Blood (Capote) based on the recommendation of another reviewer. The two books certainly don't belong on the same shelf. I just have to echo: read In Cold Blood!

Strange Piece of Paradise is true crime with a supremely ironic twist-the true crime story is written not by an investigative reporter or a psychologist, but by the victim. Terri Jentz has managed to cope with the absolute horror of an incredibly vicious attack by facing the situation head on. Her assailant was never apprehended, and many years later she returned to the small town where she and a college roommate experienced such extreme violence that the roommate refused to ever discuss it. The result of Terri's investigation is a profound book exploring a society that promulgates violence and evil.

If investigating the circumstances of her attack was a journey of healing for Jentz, writing about it was her journey of justice. During the lengthy effort to fit the bits and pieces of the past together, Jentz was also repairing her soul. Her book is so much more than a memoir-it is a riveting expose of the reality of small town life in the west. She set out determined to discover the identity of her attacker and in the process discovered herself. She pulls off the scabs of her wounds to reveal the pain and anger residing within, and is able to recognize that her life is divided into before and after. By sharing not only the details of her investigation but also her psychic journey, Jentz shows us that closure has many meanings. While the details of her attack are indeed horrific, the book offers inspiration to survivors of violence and trauma.