Customer Reviews

Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This book is an engrossing story and in many ways, a great portrait of an underportrayed and largely ignored segment of our American population - the people who work in our gas stations and bars, live in the run-down apartment complexes and cheap motels that dot the landscape, and all too often fall victim to violent crimes that are reported by local newspapers in lurid headlines, only to fade in the public's memory mere days afterward.

That being said, the book has some major flaws. My biggest problems with the book are:
- The author's prose gets a little too purply in places, and it almost seems like her imagination starts running away with her story. There's no way she could have known some of the things she talks about as fact, or even have heard those things from the friends of the deceased. In a fiction book based on actual events, that's fine; but this is presented as a nonfiction account, and it is not.
- The author makes some glaring errors, some of which have been pointed out in other reviews. One that comes to mind is when she talks about a local arcade as being a favorite hangout for Mandi and her friends, then later says the arcade didn't open until after Mandi was killed. An editor should have caught this, if not the author herself. In a work of nonfiction, when details like this are incorrect, you wonder what other details in the book are erroneous.
-Throughout the entire book, Stillman blames the Marine Corps for the deaths of Mandi Scott and Rosie Ortega, but in Mandi's case never places any of the blame where I believe it squarely lies - with Mandi's mother, who allowed her 15-year-old daughter to basically run wild. Mandi's mother Debi knew Rosie Ortega associated with Marines she considered dangerous, yet she thought nothing of letting her daughter spend the night at Rosie's apartment and run around with her friends seemingly unchecked. Stillman takes a pitying view towards Debi and her feelings of self-blame, but in my eyes Debi doesn't blame herself enough. There are predatory men everywhere, not just in Twentynine Palms, but that's why children have parents - to set limits and protect children from harm as best they can. In my view, Debi's children didn't have much chance of escaping a violent, marginal life, being raised by a woman who associated with felons, trafficked drugs, and was barely capable of taking care of herself, much less three children. Regardless of how horrible Debi's husbands beat her, she is the one who's responsible for the poor choices she made in life, although Stillman seems to want to blame the Marine Corps and the desert itself for the bad choices made by women in Mandi's family - there's very little support for personal responsibility of any kind in the book, unless Stillman is talking about the murderer's lack of remorse. It's telling that one of Mandi's friends, who wished to go find Mandi the night before the murders, was prevented from doing so by her mother and escaped harm. I don't mean to blame the victims, because Valentine Underwood, as the murderer, is the one to blame for these horrendous crimes, but if both Mandi and Rosie had been a little more careful about who they associated with, they might still be alive today.

As for the unflattering portraits of Victorville and Twentynine Palms, all I can say is that it's not surprising to me town residents would get upset about how their towns are portrayed, because Stillman definitely doesn't pull any punches when it comes to portraying how desolate and depressing the towns can be. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows how entrenched and blind to reality the so called "city fathers" and town boosters can be when it comes to their town. I am sure the towns portrayed in the book have their good qualities, and there are times when Stillman gets very condescending about the desert and its residents, as only someone from the outside can do. But I've been in too many towns like Victorville and Twentynine Palms to totally discount her descriptions.

All in all, the book is worth a read, although the way the narrative jumps around is annoying - I think people read stories about crime partially for the suspense element, and in this case you find out Underwood's sentence before the murders even happen. The book definitely could have been edited more competently, with a little less leeway given to Stillman's at times self-indulgent narrative. But the story is compelling and will stay with you long after you put the book down.

I thought 29 Palms was brilliant. The book uses a brutual double homocide near a military base as a paradigm through which to view the cyclical nature of violence against lower income females. The book definitely gave me insight into the type of aggression that all females can face, and how some seem almost predestined for violence no matter where they go. From a sociological point of view, I thought the book brilliantly stiched together the military base, the desert, and females' historical background to create this situation that continued to bubble up to the explosive and horrific conclusion. My hope is that this book will serve as a catalyst for males to rethink their treatment of females and for females to be empower to break the cycles that constantly strive to drag them down.

... Stillman uses the events in her narrative as a sociological lens to explore broader issues of marginality, power, and "family values" in American -- particularly western American -- culture. And she succeeds in doing this, brilliantly at times.

I lived in 29 Palms and neighboring towns in the Morongo Basin for six years, from 1983 to 1989, and I can tell you that the author does NOT do terrible injustice to the social environment she describes. No, all Marines are not violent sexual predators, nor are all townies speed freaks and low-lifes. But I have never encountered the kind of human desolation that I did in 29 Palms, never lived among as many lost souls filled with suspicion, apathy, aggression, rage, and bigotry. To me, the only shocking thing about the murders described in Stillman's book is that they don't happen every day in 29 Palms.

Still, one gets the sense that Stillman isn't telling us the whole story. Debi's ultimate role in her daughter's demise comes across as whitewashed (to say the least) and the author's indictment of military culture is somewhat one dimensional, doing too far in some respects, not far enough in others. But she evokes so much in her descriptions of place (some of which are quite beautiful), revealing a genuine insight for life in the desert, that I found myself lost in my own memories of the Mojave, both good and bad.

This book is a marvelous new incarnation of old-fashioned investigative journalism at its best. It was obviously written with considerable and enduring courage, the author going into a community of complicity and denial and no little violence to lay bare the reality no one wants to confront. In doing that, the author captures the sheer grit of the place, the people, the time with such force that a reader thinks he's there in the smokey desert bars, there in the Marine barracks and command quarters sour with self-delusion and bureaucratic fear, there in the dark corners of a town that watched the killing of a young woman with what can only be called moral dysfunction. And the author does it all with a grace and cut worthy of one of those Marine officer's sword cutting through a silk scarf. This is a book, as the reviewers say (the good ones anyway) that exists at so many different levels, and that gives trhe readers so mnay gifts. We see the small towns of the Great American Desert as we've never seen them before. We go inside the Marine Corps with rare understanding and compassion and accuracy, with devastating insight. We come away, as in all fine writing, with a heightened sense of what any and all of us have in common with the struggling human beings caught in this tragedy on all sides. Upton Sinclair the great American writer of a century ago once said that a free people can't be honest with themselves and others, let alone free, without honest and readable journalism. Thank God for the Stillmans who continue to give us that chance. I can't recommend this book too highly for readers of all ages, but for young adults especially, in the hope that our future in this great country might still be less haunted than our past in places like Twentynine Palms. An Admiring Fellow Author

... I am neither an acquaintance nor family member of the murder victims whose plight is recounted in Ms. Stillman's book. Nor am I a past or present resident of Twenty-nine Palms. I found this story to be engrossing with the a depth that goes well beyond a specific incident in a specific desert town. It is loaded with symbols and meaning that speak to a much broader America. That people whose lives are entwined with this story take issue with the author in their reviews is no surprise as Ms. Stillman writes with chilling candidness. As a third party reader, I found it to be a quick and exciting read and I found Ms. Stillman's writing to be very evocative especially in the way she describes the desert.

Being from Twentynine Palms originally (much of my family still lives there) & having been a friend of Mandi Scott in elementary school & junior high, I had to read this book. Mandi's family lived down the street from mine for over a year, & while the book makes her mother sound like a martyr (albeit a hard-living biker one), I remember things a bit differently. She was often inexplicably absent, her house populated with random shady characters & rumors of drug dealing, & the ever present pitbull. Mandi was neglected & desperate for affection. The author does a fairly successful job of absolving Debie McMasters of any responsibility for, if not her daughters tragic death, then the sadness & loneliness of her life. She uses this same journalistic bent to make the hometown that I recall as a warm, safe, friendly place, seem like a violent hellhole filled with miscreants, losers, & speed freaks. In the end, I feel that the book does a diservice to a town I know far better than Ms. Stillman, & a place that I love; as well as to a young girl whose murder was an isolated tragedy caused by the Marine Corps incompetance in looking after their own ranks. She does a fair job at portraying the ill ease with which the townies live side by side with the Corps, but this is a story only half told & slanted against a town which does not deserve such notoriety.

"Twentynine Palms" takes a hard look at the The Marine Corps' Underbelly. The enlisted men that roam the streets of Twentynine Palms Ca aren't the folks we want to be thinking about as we're reading "Corps Values" for a Managenent class. They aren't the Leather Necks we'd like to think are kicking terrorist butt and taking Taliban names in Afghanistan either.We'd probably like to think every one of the Marine Corps 180,000 or so enlisted men are replicas of the handsome Crew Chiefs who stand outside of George Bush's Helicopter.But Stillman depicts marines who are a uniform and a 'high-and-tight' haircut away from the kids we'd scurry to the other side of an urban street to avoid. And these, in fact, ARE the souls that are the true Core of the Corps. No, not every enlisted man is a wife beating rapist-- and sometimes this reader felt as if that what was what Stillman would have us believe--but the world of the enlisted man is a world that runs parrelell with the untouchable lower rung of the civilian world--the world we come in contact with while buying fries at a fastfood joint and give no further thought to afterwords. Stillman's book winesses these two worlds colliding-- as they have always done and probably always will do-- in small military towns across the United States where the 'townies' tend to be outcast and frustrated and drunk and the Enlisted men tend to be...well, outcast and frustrated and drunk.

The book focuses on the teenage victems of a brutal rape/murder and their families But one finishes it feeling deeply not only for the two girls and their families but for the whole faceless mass of humanity who do this country's dirtywork--who fight our wars-- while we're too harried and busy with our upper middle class lives to straighten out the flag we put out on September Eleventh that got twisted up on the pole on September Twelth.

After the horror of the above mentioned date and the all too easy patriotism most of us latched onto in its aftermath; a book like 'Twentynine Palms' will be a tough read but certainly worth the effort if only to get a real picture of the grunts who fight our wars--not to mention women who fall for these teenage warriors and in some cases are felled by their hands.

Sometimes Stillman gets a bit heavy handed and vauge with the whole metaphysics of the desert angle:

"But the desert can do that to you, in its emptiness make you connect with something other than plants that never seem to grow, make you grab onto your source and never let go, in spite of all the sunny days that can burn away all desire, even though that source was never really there when it counted." [huh? replace 'there when it counted' with 'a soul caught on fire' and you'd have a bad rhyming poem.]

And her familiararity with Marine jargon is laughable ("corpsman" are the navy's version of a medic yet she refers to marines a number of times as "Corpsmen"; She refers to bathrooms which Marines call "heads" as "latrines"--an army term; she calls marines "boots" as general name for all marines when it is used mainly to describe recruits in Boot Camp; She calls Drill instructors "drill seargants"--another army term; etc.) This may seem overly picky but The Marine Corps she sets out to describe lives and dies by it's peculiar jargon which is heavily based on Navy jargon. It is also fairly obvious that she allies herself with the Battered women against their Marine antagonists and this is understandable. But in stacking the deck in faver of the Townies she loses a bit of the tragic irony: that these two suppossedly different clans (Marines and townies) are similar to the point of being one and the same. What on the surfice seems to be a clash of sexes and social identities is infact a violent but none-the-less mystical union of the low.

The writing in this book is simply gorgeous. I generally don't read nonfiction, but a friend had this book with her, and I thumbed through it, and couldn't resist buying it. The story is compelling, and truly heartbreaking...but this is the kind of writing you don't see very often. The author is a word-painter. ... This is a beautifully-told story, and I'm glad I bought it. Passed it on to a friend who felt the same way. Five thumbs up.

I first read this book out of interest in this particular murder case. In that aspect I found it disappointing. As I am personally acquainted with some of the investigators and one of the witnesses, I didn't find it to be completely accurate regarding the case; having known so many Marines and Gulf War veterans, I found it's characterizations to be sweeping generalizations; having lived in 29 Palms, I found it to be glarely inaccurate in its portrayal of the area and, yes, offensive.
However, in re-reading this just as a crime story, it makes for a good read. Like those movies you enjoy that are "based on" or "inspired by" a true story, it is much better if you don't really know the true story. Allowing then that this is a fictionalized account, it is well written and at times a real page-turner.

Having just finished "Twentynine Palms", I was curious to see how others responded to the book. I am a resident of the High Desert for over 12 years, and have spent a great deal of time in Twentynine Palms as an archaeologist. This book tries to capture the almost surreal, shabby, experience of the town, and manages to do so as best as can be described(the experience does truly defy definition).
In reading the other reviews, I note that focus seems to be on the depiction of locals and the town itself. Therefore, I wanted to add my review for the purpose of commenting on the amount of dedication to detail the author demonstrates. It is evident that a great deal of research has been done, most of the characters are depicted in a realistic manner, all the while expressing the underlining of tragic hopelessness. I do agree that attention to the military aspect was not as accurate, however, having been a long time resident of the area, I am also aware of how protective the long arm of the military can be, and how hard it would no doubt be to obtain an accurate account. Hopefully this book will generate enough understanding of the inexcusable actions no doubt commonly covered up, and continue to express concern for the victims of violent crime, no matter what the circumstances leading to them, or the lifestyles of the victims themselves.
I strongly recommend this book, and if you are ever in the area, I also recommend "Raven's Books" (its in the book). It is the greatest source of our extensive library, and while we miss visiting with its owner who sadly passed away last year, is still our favorite hang out in town!