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Sometime around 10:30am on the morning of Saturday, November 12th, 2011, a 24-year-old Danvers, Massachusetts man knocked on his neighbor’s door. When the neighbor opened the door, the man took the cat he was carrying under his arm and tossed it into the neighbor’s house. Startled, the neighbor asked him…
Read moreFew places in America are as interesting as the Mississippi delta. Stretching 250 miles from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south, and about 80 miles wide, the delta is a pancake flat alluvial plain bordered by the Mississippi River on the west and the Mississippi hill country…
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 moreSteve Jobs was a jerk. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a visionary. In fact, Jobs was almost singlehandedly responsible for making computers well designed and user friendly. If it wasn’t for Jobs, the prickly and aggressive founder of Apple, you would still be looking at a command prompt when…
Read moreAt Windy Point the wind is said to blow so hard that you are advised to wear goggles and a bandana to keep the grit out of your eyes. I was prepared with these accessories but hardly needed them. The day was sunny and still. The dunes piled up against…
Read moreA popular trope in horror is the isolated farmhouse, the remote village, where gruesome serial murders take place. Innocent victims stumble onto the site and are brutally tortured and slain. Shockingly the only thing flawed with this rendition is the setting. The most notorious serial murders have not taken place…
Read moreIn the bayous south and west of New Orleans the fallout from the BP oil spill continues to be felt more than a year after the well was capped. Shrimp boats sit idle, not because the fisheries are producing seafood that is unsafe to eat – Gulf Coast seafood was…
Read moreEven 70 years later, one of the most common questions asked by tourists visiting Atlanta is “Where is Tara?” Not where is Coca Cola, where is CNN or where is Olympic Park. They want to see the iconic antebellum home where Scarlett flirted with her beaus and later, having been…
Read moreA weekend in April is all you need to fully appreciate the gracious 19th century charm of bluegrass country. Rolling green hills seamed with plank fences, vast blue skies and thoroughbreds. Warm-hearted people, great food and the world’s best handcrafted bourbons. A trip to Lexington in springtime is as invigorating…
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…
