21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Putting 'true' back in true crime, October 22, 2005
This review is from: Trail Of Feathers: Searching for Philip True (Hardcover)
With a few notable exceptions, true-crime literature has lately resembled what you get when you send a cub reporter to a lurid freak show.
It goes like this: A detached and usually mercenary author parachutes into the scene of the crime - often after an uncomfortably long interval - and pieces together the story from court transcripts, interviews (a bigger advance for an "exclusive" with the killer!) and a few grisly photos.
And the result - again, with notable exceptions - has generally been fodder for a mass market whose book-shopping starts with a surreptitious glance at the grisly photos printed in the middle of the paperback.
But then there are those exceptions. Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" was the seminal, postmodern true-crime tale. Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" was the first great true crime-insider blockbuster. Joe McGinniss' "Fatal Vision" and Joseph Wambaugh's "The Onion Field" made relatively common crimes intensely personal. Each shares one thing: A "true" ending that isn't any ending at all, but a gateway to unanswered questions about humanity we might never answer satisfactorily.
Comes now Robert Rivard's "Trail of Feathers." Aptly labeled a "true crime/memoir," it's not just one story of crime and punishment, but also an exploration of deeply hidden personal secrets, bonds between men, the nature of contemporary journalism, cultural differences, the nature of justice and, ultimately, what one editor believed he owed a friend and reporter.
In December 1998, San-Antonio (Texas) Express-News reporter Philip True, 50, disappeared on a solitary hike into a dangerous Mexican wilderness. It was to be the Mexico City correspondent's last great adventure before the birth of his first child, but he also hoped it would provide material for a story he desperately wanted to write about Mexico's isolated Huichol Indians.
Author Rivard - then and now editor of the Express-News - joins a small search party that plunges deep into the alien region. Miraculously, he follows a trail of downy feathers from True's sleeping bag to a shallow grave where they find his decaying corpse. He'd been murdered.
Rivard's search doesn't stop in that rugged gorge, even as Mexican authorities arrest two Huichol Indian suspects in the killing, setting in motion a labyrinthine trial process. Delving deeply into True's past, Rivard finds both unnerving secrets and peculiar similarities between himself and True to bind them even closer in this tale of unsettled lives and unexpected death.
The perverse rhythms of Mexican justice add a final, disturbing twist to Rivard's story. Even now, almost seven years later, True's confessed killers remain free, safe within the invisible walls that surround the Sierra Madre Occidental and their reclusive culture.
Rivard, a former foreign correspondent himself, writes with clarity and sensitivity. His research is impeccable and voluminous, yet his storytelling isn't larded with footnotes and cumbersome arcana. He imbues common stories of human frailty and triumph with an engaging universality, and he brings often unfathomable issues of international relations and cultures in conflict to the human level.
But more importantly, he has submitted a far more intimate true-crime book than the market has seen in many years. He understood he was a part of this story and he accompanies the reader every step of the way, holding a hand when necessary.
Another failing of contemporary true-crime writing has been its tabloid-y texture, valuing blood splatters over social studies. "Trail of Feathers" deftly explores the effects of a single choice as they ripple outward. Philip True's ill-fated journey set in motion several other journeys, some of which have not yet ended.
That might be an uncomfortable conclusion for mass-market true-crime fans, but it's real. It's true.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Houston Chronicle review, December 7, 2005
This review is from: Trail Of Feathers: Searching for Philip True (Hardcover)
from the HOUSTON CHRONICLE Sun, 23 Oct 2005
On the trail of Philip True / San Antonio editor writes
powerful and personal account of reporter's life and death in
Mexico
PHILIP True was a renegade reporter who came to his calling late in life, having packed his bags with experiences that ranged from an abusive childhood to hippie college days to stints as union organizer and wallpaper hanger.
By 1998 he found himself, at 50, finally grown up - even successful. As foreign correspondent for a major Texas newspaper, he had things others coveted: a wonderful loving wife, Martha, who was pregnant with their first child; a home in Mexico City's Las Lomas neighborhood filled with his travel photographs, a colorful and eclectic collection of artesania, and a cranky parrot named Fidel.
Despite his success True remained the driven adventurer he had always been (Tim Padgett, a colleague, called him the "Jack Kerouac of Mexican correspondents"). And those wandering ways, along with the demons of his childhood and his love for a story, took him once more on the road just after Thanksgiving in 1998 and, then, to his death.
True's murder in the Sierra Madre mountains, the search to find his body and the lengthy pursuit of his attackers are chronicled in ``Trail of Feathers,'' a bold and heartbreaking book by True's former editor, Robert Rivard. The title is taken from the day in December 1998 when Rivard, together with an elderly Huichol Indian, a search party of Mexican military officers, and True's best friend, followed goose down that had leaked from True's sleeping bag into the Chapalagana, the deep canyon named "The Twisted Serpent," where his body had been hastily buried under sand and gravel.
The book is many things at once: A wildlife adventure story and true-crime tale; an account of True's own off-beat life (aspects of which he had never shared even with his wife); Rivard's personal quest to find True and then to avenge his murder; and an analysis of how politics and the U.S. and Mexican governments both helped and hindered the investigation of the first modern-day homicide of a foreign correspondent on Mexican soil.
I knew Philip and Martha when I lived in Mexico City from 1996 to 1998. My own memories of Philip include eating an excellent home-cooked meal he made in his Las Lomas home and sitting up late talking about his crazy adventures: long bike rides on rough Mexican highways, cross-country hitchhiking in the United States and plenty of solo hikes into remote wilderness areas. I remember that Philip's voice took on a tone of heightened passion when he spoke about brief forays into the roadless and otherworldly territory of the Huichol Indians - the place he would die.
True disappeared in the roadless and rugged wilderness of the Sierra Madre that is formally part of the Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit but truly belongs to no one but the Huichol, indigenous people who have steadfastly kept to themselves and refused to assimilate into the great mestizo mix that makes up most of Mexico. He journeyed there with the idea of chronicling the Huichol culture, which he deeply admired, though his previous trips had been to a more modernized village on its fringes.
He had planned an ambitious 10-day trek through territorio Huichol, at the end of which he proposed to do an unprecedented and exclusive story with photos of the reclusive people for the San Antonio Express-News, where Rivard is editor.
But True, known to his friends as a rebel, had not obtained permission from his own editors to do the piece, instead taking off alone during vacation time. Nor had he sought advance permission from the myriad tribal chiefs who control the tiny villages and homesteads of Huichol country. For that supposed sin, some in Mexico were unsympathetic even to his wife, a native Mexican, who first asked her own government for help finding True, and then for help finding his killers.
But Martha True, who now lives in Brownsville with the son she had prematurely in 1999 after Philip's death, had an important ally in Rivard. Rivard was a high-ranking gringo editor who had hired True and had long years of experience in Mexico and Central America. Rivard's own troubled childhood and his career path from blue-collar worker to foreign correspondent mirrored True's.
Despite knowing nothing about True's plans and never having seen his proposal for the Huichol story, Rivard could not help blaming himself, at least in part, for the tragedy. A few days after True went missing, Rivard stepped in and pulled every string he could to find his lost reporter - even going to the Mexican president's office to appeal for help and then joining a reluctant general aboard an army search helicopter.
Rivard would return to Mexico again and again to dog the investigation of True's murder and the prosecution of his attackers. True's killers, both renegade Huichols, were arrested by Mexican authorities but released after a rural judge rejected the evidence against them, including their confessions. Though later convicted, the two men remain at large and are assumed to be somewhere in the same roadless wilderness where True died.
In the book Rivard explores various explanations the Huichols themselves offered for why they killed True. Among them: the violent attitude of the leader of the two outcasts; their hatred of outsiders; fear and anger about True's mission; drunkenness and a desire for the reporter's cash, camera and other possessions. In the end, readers are left to decipher the clues.
Even now, nearly seven years later, Rivard has refused to give up on finding the killers, recently flying into Huichol territory in yet another attempt to seek justice by offering a reward for tips leading to their capture. The book is his way of keeping True's memory alive and continuing his struggle.
The first part of Rivard's book is about True's life, why he took that fatal trek and how he disappeared and died. Then Rivard explores the equally twisted path of what happened to the murder case in the Mexican judicial system.
The details are heartbreaking not only because of True's tragic end but also because of Rivard's personal connection to his former reporter, which drives him to find True's body and even to witness his autopsy. The details gathered from these personal quests are all the more disturbing because they are shared by an author who was not an impartial observer but a deeply affected friend.
As someone who knew True and his wife, there were disturbing details I might have preferred not to know. Rivard shared secrets that True had long guarded, some even from his own wife. Drawing from his own notes, Rivard also takes readers in rich and horrifying detail to the site of True's grave and then to the autopsy table.
Rivard, who covered Central American wars for Newsweek magazine, frequently contributes prose powerful enough that after putting the book down at night I lay awake for hours reliving conversations I had had with True about the Huichol, about hiking and about solo on-the-road adventures and the dangers involved.
Rivard writes especially powerfully of his trip to find Philip's body and of the autopsy, during which he discovers first-hand the evidence and trauma of True's murder. The images Rivard planted in my mind of my friend's death, decay and dissection were not welcome but perhaps necessary. Philip did not die an easy death. Some passages made me shudder and feel again the pain that I and many other friends felt when the news went over the wires in 1998, first that True was missing and later that he had been found dead.
This book is enthralling. Both those who knew True and those who never met him will come to know him better through Rivard. They will also come to know the glaring weaknesses of the Mexican judicial system, where judges schmooze and privately celebrate with lawyers, records are closed, important evidence disappears and the guilty are often arrested or sprung for political reasons.
But to me, the true power of the book is very personal.
Like Martha True, I was pregnant when Philip died and felt some shadow of her intense grief. The child Martha was carrying when Philip disappeared is now 6, the age of my own son. No book can give this little boy back his father or restore to Martha the man she loved for all of his eccentricities.
But perhaps when that boy is old enough ``Trail of Feathers'' will allow Teo, as True's son is known, to know his father in some ways that might not otherwise have been possible.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Check all baggage, October 20, 2005
This review is from: Trail Of Feathers: Searching for Philip True (Hardcover)
This is a riveting book that's based on a true story but reads like a novel. I could not put it down. There's lots of action and intrigue in an exotic location, poignant and troublesome in places, but memorable characters combine with excellent storytelling to keep the reader moving along. The author has done extensive research and sticks close to the facts surrounding a reporter's murder in Mexico, thoughtfully interpreting all Spanish-language dialogue and explaining some aspects of culture in Mexico and big-city daily newspapering along the way.
Aficionados of 20th century literature may see a little bit of Hemingway and/or McMurtry in the opening chapters, in which a man-versus-nature plot seems to be taking shape. It's not long, however, before darker, more F. Scott Fitzgerald-like themes emerge, with troubling experiences in the formative years coming back to haunt the principals as the story repeatedly invokes the final line of The Great Gatsby: "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Astute observers of human behavior may wonder: Are the rocks that Philip True carries in his backpack in Mexico City while training for his ill-fated trek a metaphor for a lifelong burden that should be shed? Are the feathers that True totes into the mountains a symbol of vulnerability, as they are in the animal kingdom during molting, which is by definition a transition period? And what are we to make of True's choice of favorite flower, the iris, which according to Scoble and Field in "The Meaning of Flowers" was the name chosen by the Greeks for their messenger goddess, "who guided the soul to eternity after death"?
There may be numerous messages in "Trail of Feathers" but one important theme that emerges from this book seems to be that checking one's baggage is the best way to lighten the load on the journey through life.
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