Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
The first line of Frazier’s new novel pulls you in: “Luce’s new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.” You just can’t quit after a line like that; you have to go on. Follow with “The children loved fire above all elements of creation,” and you have the beginnings of a tale of crime […]
A Stolen Life, by Jaycee Dugard
Phillip Garrido, the low-life who kidnapped eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard and held her prisoner for 18 years, was sentenced to 431 years in prison for his unspeakable crimes. Nancy, his wife, got 36 years. A Stolen Life, written by Jaycee Dugard, is the story of what happened
The Way, starring Martin Sheen
A phone call, a flight to Paris, an unexpected journey: these are the basic elements of The Way, a movie written and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring Martin Sheen. The call is from a police officer in the village of St. Jean de Port, France
Tabloid: A Documentary
Kidnapping, rape, guns and handcuffs, The Joy of Sex, blue silk pajamas: the new Errol Morris documentary has it all. Based on the notorious Case of the Manacled Mormon, Tabloid is a delightful film. For fully half the movie you don’t know what to believe
Battles Won, Lost, Yet to be Fought
My brother turned 65 the day Osama bin Laden was killed, but he didn’t hear about it until the next morning. By the time the President came on TV to tell the world what had happened, Fred was already asleep. The party was over, candles extinguished
Badlands
Badlands is a film unlike any I’ve ever seen. Written, produced, and directed by Terrence Malick, the movie stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Released in 1973, it’s a dramatization of the Starkweather – Fugate crime spree of 1958 in which the couple kills 11 people, beginning with Fugate’s parents
The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi
Amanda Knox, the honor student from Seattle, Washington, has been imprisoned in Perugia, Italy, since November, 2007. This book, The Monster of Florence
“The Long Walk,” by Slavomir Rawicz, and “The Way Back,” the film version
To escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 and walk across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, to British-controlled India, a distance of four thousand miles, is an impossible feat
