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You would think that jumping out of an airplane at 13,000 feet would be terrifying but for Belle and I it was more of a relief. The whole experience had not started off well. The previous day I had gotten a call on my cell phone while we were in…
Read moreHere’s what I learned from the media on February 18th: Justin Bieber is acting strangely. He wore a gas mask in public for no apparent reason and stormed out of his own birthday party. Here’s what I learned at Kitt Peak Observatory on Saturday: Early in the afternoon of Friday,…
Read moreMy poor wife. She was lacking something. She was suffering a deficit. She had a hole where her experience of America had been. She had never been to Yellowstone. Worse yet, she had never seen the Grand Tetons or been to a rodeo. It was a tragic thing. Think about…
Read moreFly Fishing has taught me to respect fish. In two days of fishing in the mountains outside Denver, Colorado I managed to hook a surprising number of rainbow trout. Yet during that same time I managed to hook myself no less than nine times and each time it was a…
Read moreOn April 20th, 1999 two students entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and started shooting. One of the students, 18-year-old Eric Harris, had a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and a 9mm carbine with thirteen 10-round magazines. The other student, 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, had a 9mm handgun with one 52-, one…
Read moreWhen Chicago mobster Anthony “the Ant” Spilotro started burglarizing businesses in the Las Vegas area, the federal government and the Las Vegas gaming commission had seen enough. So had the mob. Spilotro had been screwing up a good thing, drawing unwanted attention to mob influence in the city. So they…
Read moreA bright, enchanting New Mexico morning. I pull onto the interstate, old 66 running beside. The land slides and yaws like water in a bucket, waves of rolling terrain, an ocean of pale grass flecked with sagebrush and streaked with browns and reds. The mountains heave themselves up, haughty, and…
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Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier by Tom Kizzia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The question of what to do when a child is lured into a cult is hard enough, but the issue becomes even more complicated when the cult is actually the child’s family and the cult leader is the child’s father. The complications deepen when the cult leader and his family are elevated to the status of a cause celebre by anti-government groups fighting the US Park Service in a remote corner of Alaska…
