MADreads

Paradise is where you find it

January 10th, 2007 Sarah - Alicia Ashman

“The sound of screeching tires woke me.  It was near midnight, and we had just gone to sleep.  A stranger deliberately drove over our tent, then attacked us both with an axe.  I saw his torso.  He was a meticulous cowboy who looked like he had stopped off a movie set.  My great voyage across America ended abruptly there.  And that was how I reached young adulthood, with a certain knowledge of life at its farthest edges.”  (p. 4.)

In 1977 a young woman named Terri Jentz and her friend, Shayna Weiss, started out on a bike trip across America.  Just a few short days later, on June 22, they were the victims of the attack described above.  Jentz tells the story of the attack, as well as her twenty-year quest to find her attacker, in the 2006 New York Times Notable Book Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West To Investigate My Attempted Murder–And Solve the Riddle of Myself.

If you’ve got the strength to take all of its 500+ pages on, I can promise you you’re in for a read you won’t soon forget.  Yes, it’s sad, and yes, it’s scary, but it’s also strangely uplifting.  It is, after all, a true survival story; not only of body, but also of spirit.

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction