The Grey

In one of the first scenes, Neeson kills a wolf.  The camera goes in for a closeup.  Blood from her head and mouth spreads over the snow.  She does not move, but her belly continues to rise and fall.  Is she still breathing, or is she carrying pups?  Neeson goes to her, lays his hand on her belly, and the movement stops.  The camera cuts to a closeup of Neeson’s face; he’s old and he’s tired.  He’s killed a wolf.  If there’s meaning to this senseless act, we’ll have to wait to discover it.

Death is everywhere in this movie.  The men who survive the plane crash make foolish decisions, and they die. Why leave the shelter of their downed plane to head into a woods where there is no shelter?  Ah, because Neeson’s character thinks their plane has crashed into a wolf den.  Wolf den?  Out in the middle of a snowy nowhere?  No rocks, no trees, no place to den?  The movie is based on such falsehood, such non-understanding of wolves, it’s hard to sit through.

Wolves do not attack humans.  The few accounts of such “attacks” are either suspect or figments of someone’s overactive imagination.  The men in this movie evidently never got over their fear of the big, bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.  These supposedly grown-up, weather-hardened, hard-drinking men persist in believing these myths about wolves, despite studies that absolutely, irrevocably disprove these selfsame myths.

Throughout the centuries, wolves have been labeled as minions of Satan, indiscriminate killers, fearsome animals that must be hunted down and killed.  We set snares for them.  We trapped them.   We set them on fire.  We injected them with contagious strains of mange.  We laced meat with strychnine.  We gassed their dens.  We set a bounty on wolf hides.  We did all that to them, and more.  By 1970, wolves were nearly extinct.

The cry of a wolf is a spine-tingling thing. You can hear the loneliness, the anguish, the grief in it.  And when a single wolf is joined by members of his pack or by other wolves, outliers or juveniles, it can be a chilling thing.  Yet wolves are intelligent, curious, beautiful animals.  Around humans they’re often shy, submissive, as if they realize man can be a fearsome predator, yet they’re drawn to him in much the same way dogs are drawn to humans.

Wolves form family units, they mate for life, and they grieve when their families are broken up.  Their diet consists mostly of mice, birds, and carrion.  Wolf packs cooperate to bring down larger prey:  deer, moose, or elk.  Yet it is the old, the sick, and the weak they attack, leaving the fittest to survive and to reproduce.

This movie does more to degrade science, to obscure the truths that have only within the last fifty years begun to seep into our collective consciousness:   that in nature there is predator and prey, that the natural world is a violent place, that predation is necessary in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem, that the wolf has a role in preserving the delicate balance nature tries to achieve, despite the best efforts of mankind to disrupt that balance.  All these things are cast overboard in this movie.

This portrayal of wolves does nothing to advance our understanding of nature.  Nor does it speak well of those who claim dominion over them.

Luce takes her murdered sister’s orphaned children into her home, and the reclusive life she’d been living is upended.  She tries to teach them language and other skills they’ll need to negotiate the world, with little success.  All she can really do is give them time to heal.  Luce will care for these children no matter how many chickens they kill or how many fires they set.  She will love them and expect nothing in return.

Then the man Luce believes is responsible for her sister’s death comes to town.  He sets up shop in a tavern that fronts a bootlegging operation, and he begins the hunt for his stolen money.  The climactic battle between Luce and this man is an epic one, moving up into the hills to a mysterious black hole.

Read this book for the pure pleasure of going into the mountains with this great writer.  Let him show you the chestnut saplings that “refuse to accept the terms of their extinction.”  See the two kids who “fit perfectly into the sway of the old mare’s back.”  Savor Luce’s reluctant description of the twins:  “a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.”

Read this book and try to decide who will play the role of Luce:  it will be a delicious part for any actress.

Though Garrido was in therapy during all that time, none of his psychiatrists, psychologists, or therapists, ever saw the evil in this man.  None grasped the depths of depravity to which he had sunk.   Parole officers never imagined the crimes he was committing on an ongoing basis.  No one ever suspected he had kidnapped a little girl, was holding her in his back yard, and sexually abusing her at will.

Various law enforcement officials visited the house where Garrido lived, but none bothered to look in the back yard.  No one wondered why a man on parole would build such a shelter.  None asked who might be living in the shelter.  When Garrido tested “dirty” for drugs, they accepted his explanation:  he’d been to a party and someone must have spiked his drink.  Despite his long history of drug abuse, they accepted this bogus story.   Even Jaycee wondered how they could be so gullible.

For 18 years Phillip Garrido got away with it.  Angels helped him, he said.

As Jaycee points out in this book that will break your heart, Garrido never did anything for anyone but himself.  “Phillip is narcissistic and only does things that benefit him,” she says.  “Therapy did nothing to help him.”

She’s forgiven him for what he did, yet at one point in the book she wonders.  “I’m not sure I have the right to forgive him.”

It’s a difficult book to read.   But if you can get through the horrific parts, what you see is an amazing girl.  She’s smart, she’s accomplished, she’s no fool.  She’s a survivor, this girl, now grown to womanhood.

Jaycee didn’t attend Garrido’s sentencing, but she sent a message:  “There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions. To you, Phillip, I say that I have always been a thing for your own amusement.  I hated every second of every day of 18 years because of you and the sexual perversion you forced on me.”

Jaycee Dugard is okay now.  She’s been reunited with her family, and her children are doing fine.  She’s made new friends and is learning how to negotiate the world that was kept from her for so long.  The evil man who kidnapped her and his equally evil wife no longer matter to her.

Leaving his comfortable California life behind, Tom travels to St. Jean de Port where he identifies Daniel’s body and takes possession of his son’s personal effects.  In his hotel room that night he goes through the things his son left behind.  Inside Daniel’s backpack he finds a “credencial,” a pilgrim’s passport that, when stamped at various towns along the route, will document that the bearer has completed the pilgrimage to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  Legend holds that the remains of the Apostle St. James are buried beneath the church there.

Pilgrims have been walking the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, for over a thousand years.  Beginning the journey at one of several towns in southern France, they cross the Pyranees and walk across northern Spain, Basque country, until they arrive at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galacia.  It’s a difficult task, one that takes many weeks and sometimes months to complete.

At some point during the night, Tom Avery makes the decision to complete the pilgrimage his son had only begun.  Shouldering the backpack that contains Daniel’s ashes, he sets out on the 500 mile hike across the Pyranees.   An inexperienced trekker, he hardly knows why he’s doing it or what he might encounter.  He knows only that he must complete this journey in place of his son.

Along the way he sleeps in hostels, limps along on sore feet, loses his backpack, is joined by traveling companions who fall in step with him, then disappear, only to reappear.  Despite the near impossibility of the task, he never stops, never ceases to put one foot in front of the other, until he finally arrives at the Cathedral.  He and the three companions who have joined him lay their hands on a pillar just inside the church, and their fingers fit the imprint worn into the stone by those who made the journey before them.

The story is touching, the scenery wonderful, the gift Tom ultimately receives so gratifying, I want to fly to Paris, buy a pair of hiking boots and backpack, and set off on this journey so many before me have taken.

Kirk Anderson was not a particularly handsome man.  In the late 1970s when these outrageous things happened, he was big, bulky, he wore specs, and his hair resembled that of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.  Eight years younger than Joyce, he was inexperienced in the ways of the world, shy, and by some accounts, flabby.  But to petite Joyce McKinney, he was heaven.  Her love for him was unquenchable, obsessive, not to be denied.

The film opens with footage of a young Joyce McKinney strolling through a garden, reading from her unfinished memoir, “A Very Special Love Story.” Segue to a middle-aged Joyce being interviewed by Errol Morris about the sex and bondage scandal that swept across two continents.  Thirty years have gone by, and she’s still pretty, still in love with Kirk, and utterly convinced she did nothing wrong.  She trips through the story, laughing at her jokes, tearful at times, but always charismatic, a woman secure in the knowledge that love is the most important thing in life, and the motivation for everything she did.  If this is a theatrical performance, as some suggest, bring it on.  She’s a delight to behold.

Morris keeps the camera trained on Joyce, breaking away for occasional clips from old TV shows, commentary from various friends and accomplices, and psychological insights offered by the blue-eyed, ex-Mormon, Troy Williams.  It’s Troy who provides balance between what the viewer increasingly wonders is fantasy, and the inner struggles Kirk must have felt.

The film is less an examination of tabloid journalism than a view of a woman obsessed with love, determined to free her delicious Kirk from the clutches of the “cult” that has spirited him off to England.  Joyce hires a plane and pilot to take her to there.  In her suitcase are the accouterments she’ll need to pull this off.  Only later do we learn the gun is plastic, the handcuffs are lined with mink, and The Joy of Sex offers advice on how to counter the religious brainwashing to which poor Kirk has been subjected.

Working with accomplice Keith May, Joyce abducts her Mormon boyfriend from the steps of the LDS meetinghouse and takes him to a remote cottage in Devon.  Joyce and Kirk spend three days there, days filled with sex, comfort food, and gentle bondage.  Her plan is to keep him there until she’s pregnant.  She wants nothing more than to marry him and have his babies.

Here the story gets a little foggy.  Did Kirk escape and run back to the safety of his Mormon friends?  Or did the Mormons somehow lure him away from Joyce and convince him to say terrible things about what Joyce had done.  Troy Williams offers his view:  Kirk loved the sex, but he was overcome with guilt.  Back in the safety of the Mormon enclave, he confessed his sins and repented of them.  Loudly proclaiming her innocence, Joyce is arrested.    Mail, delivered to her jail cell, contains numerous offers from men wanting to be abducted, tied spread-eagled to a bed, massaged with her signature cinnamon oil.

Released on bail, Joyce and her accomplice flee to Canada, passing through customs disguised as deaf-mutes.  Meanwhile, tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic are off to the races, alleging that before her sojourn in England Joyce was a high-priced prostitute who specialized in sadomasochistic nude photos.  It’s a charge Joyce vehemently denies.

Kirk opts to go back to the safe and familiar Mormon way of life.  He marries the ample wife the Mormon elders have chosen for him, fathers children, and presumably dreams of the day when he will be lord and master of his own planet.  (Does this vision of the afterlife sound like something akin to the Islamist belief in 72 virgins waiting in heaven?)

At the end of the movie Joyce is alone on her parents’ farm in Virginia, agoraphobic, still working on her memoir.  The notes and clippings she’s collected over the years have been stolen, but she soldiers on, surrounded by the five pit bulls cloned by a South Korean veterinarian from her beloved Booger’s ear tissue.

Kirk chose not to participate in the making of the documentary, so we have no way of knowing what he might have said all these years later.  The three days in the Devon bungalow, the ropes and chains, the ripping off of his Temple garments (a kind of union suit worn by Mormon elders that protect them from temptation and evil), the sex, the comfort food, the massages – we can only imagine what  pleasure he may have felt, and later, the depths of his guilt.  On the subject of those unbleached cotton undergarments, the ones he put on the day of his endowment ceremony, Joyce is equally mum.  All she’ll say is that she ripped them from his body and threw them in the fire.

But this I wonder:  will Kirk Anderson ever catch a whiff of cinnamon without thinking of Joyce?  When that bounteous Mormon wife sprinkles cinnamon on her bread pudding, or she stirs cinnamon into her oatmeal cookie dough, or she makes cinnamon toast for the children, and the cinnamon smell wafts through the kitchen, will he remember Joyce?  How could he not?

Morris has directed other documentaries, including Standard Operating Procedure,  Gates of Heaven, and The Thin Blue Line. He won an Academy Award in 2003 for his film, The Fog of War:  Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Tabloid may be his best yet.

When he turned on the news the next morning he learned of the helicopter raid on the compound in Abbottabad, the shooting, the extraction of the remains, the religious ceremony aboard ship, and the dumping of the body in the Adriatic Sea.   He saw reruns of Obama’s speech delivered at 11:35 PM the previous night.  He watched, he marveled, he felt a surge of pride in the Navy Seals who had pulled off this daring feat, and he got ready to go to work.  Though he’d reached the age when men usually retire, he had no intention of doing that.  He liked his work too much, couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he didn’t have a string of jobs laid out ahead of him.

My brother is an excavator, a road-builder, a man who’s been self-employed for most of his life.  He owns bobcats, backhoes, trucks, trailers, and those heavy metal plates they use to cover road excavations.  Among his clients are the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (they call him when the need help clearing snow from public roads), the Phone Company (they’re always needing trenches dug so they can bury their cables), builders needing roads, foundations, and septic systems, farmers needing to bury dead horses.  He’s good at his job, charges a fair price, and he’s earned the respect of nearly everyone in Adams County and beyond.

His client that morning needed a drain field, so my brother went outside and loaded up his backhoe, and it didn’t occur to him the ten-year hunt for bin Laden had ended on his birthday.

And a momentous birthday it was.   His wife, Edna, and daughter, Teresa, had thrown a surprise party, and they’d pulled it off.  When the three of them walked into the banquet room at The Pike Restaurant in Gettysburg, a hundred of Fred’s closest friends were there, waiting for him.  Someone turned up the lights, and we began to sing Happy Birthday.  Fred stood there, totally shocked, looking around the room, nearly overcome at the turnout.  At one point he made a half-hearted run for the door, but Edna caught him and dragged him back.  We finished the song, and the party began.

He said later he knew something was up when he spotted me, his favorite sister, in the crowd.  I’d come a long way to be with him that day – seven hundred miles – driving from Nashville, TN to Gettysburg, PA.

The birthday was momentous for another reason.  On the day bin Laden died, May 1st, 2011,  Fred joined the ranks of those covered by Medicare.  He’d been waiting a long time.  For years he’d bought private health insurance, which, for the self-employed, is a nightmare.  He paid the premiums, and time after time the insurance company denied his claims.

He had cornea repair.  To save his eyesight.  A man can’t drive a truck without good eyesight.  The state of Pennsylvania will yank your drivers’ license, if they know your vision is less than perfect.  He can’t operate a backhoe or any other piece of heavy equipment.

The bill for the surgery was over $3000.  The insurance company paid $200.  When he complained, they said that’s the amount it should have cost, and that was what they were authorized to pay.  Fred had no choice but to pay the balance.

His eyesight did not improve.  Something was wrong.  Some stitches have broken loose, the doctor said.  It happens sometimes.  We’ll have to go in again.  It’ll be more involved this time.  The outcome is less certain.

The final cost was $4000 and change.  The insurance company kicked in $1000.

A year later Fred developed frozen shoulder.  This time he did his homework:  the cost for surgical repair of the rotator cuff would be around $10,000.   He decided to do physical therapy instead.  Insurance would pay for three visits to a therapist.  It took six months, but the shoulder healed, and he was able to go back to work.

Going on Medicare was a blessing.  Two months before his birthday, he went to the Social Security office and signed the papers.  He bought medigap insurance, but skipped the prescription drug benefit.  He’d take generics.  If he needed more expensive drugs, which seemed unlikely, he’d bite the bullet.

There are other sides to my brother;  he’s an antique car aficionado, a storyteller, and a history buff.   I never visit him that he doesn’t at some point take me down to his garage to show me the car he’s working on.  He likes to tell the story of the day he chauffeured a bride and groom from the church to the reception in his 1940 Buick Super.  On the climb up Caledonia Mountain the car overheated.  He thought he could make it to the top, but the radiator blew, spraying coolant over the engine compartment, the hood, the windshield.  My brother pulled to the side of the road, and they waited, bride and groom, Fred and Edna, for someone to come to their rescue.

Here’s what he’s never been:  a reader.  His days were long and when the sun set in the evening, he still had work to do, keeping his books, maintaining his equipment, repairing things that had broken.  When he was laid up with frozen shoulder, and the pain was so fierce he couldn’t drive his truck or operate his backhoe, I bought him a copy of David L. Robbins book, The Last Citadel:  A Novel of the Battle of Kurst. He’d always been interested in the Second World War.  He knew about tank warfare, knew the battle at Kurst was the greatest tank battle in history, could tell you the names of the different tanks used by each side, knew of the super-tank called Tiger that was terrified the Russians, knew that the Germans went down to defeat despite their superior weaponry.  He read the book and loved it.

For his 65th birthday I gave him another Robbins book, The War of the Rats. I’d heard him talk about the battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in history, the horrendous cruelty on both sides, the total destruction of Germany’s 6th Army.  This tale of a Russian and a German sniper pitted against each other was a different side of the battle, and I thought he might like it.

Osama bin Laden is dead, my brother is on Medicare, his shoulder is fine, his retinas are intact.  He intends to keep working as long as he’s able.  And when he’s not, there are war stories he might read, and enjoy.

There are other books.  One I think he might like is Larry Brown’s collection, Billy Ray’s Farm:  Essays from a Place Called Tula.

Larry Brown is a literary writer, but he writes of ordinary things, and that is his genius.  I think my brother might see a connection between his life and that of Larry Brown.  I think he’d like to read the story of  how Brown built his “little house” in the woods, and how one of the walls fell on him as he was trying to raise it, and it hurt so bad he cried.  If he read the two essays about Billy Ray’s farm and the cows that kept dying because their calves were either breach or too big or some other unexpected thing, he’d think of our father and how hard it is to be a farmer.  He’d understand Brown’s anger at the coyote who stole the baby goats.  Because he’s operated a backhoe himself, he’d love to know just how “Lynn Hewlett… once loaded up a bad bull in a backhoe bucket.”

It would be a cornucopia of deliciousness, for Fred to read Larry Brown’s collection of essays.  I just know it would.

If his shoulder should freeze up again, or his retinas or corneas do something to cause new problems, or his arthritis become too painful for him to jump onto his trailer to chain the backhoe or the bobcat in place, there are other books I can send him.

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 and two-year-old sister.

I loved this movie.  I loved it so much I watched it twice.  I love the non sequiturs, the bits of dialog that seem so random, the voice-over technique Malick uses, the sparseness of the story set against the vast, western sky.

Kit Carruthers, Malick’s fictional version of Starkweather,  is collecting garbage in an alley in Fort Dupree, South Dakota, when he sees Holly Sargis twirling a baton in front of her house.  He is immediately smitten.

Kit: “Just thought I’d come over and say hello to ya. I’ll try anything once….Listen, Holly, you, uh, I don’t know, want to take a walk with me?”
Holly: “What for?”
Kit: “Aw, I got some stuff to say. Guess I’m kind of lucky that way.”

Holly narrates:  “He was handsomer than anybody I’d ever met. He looked just like James Dean.”  Later, in a more reflective mood, “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.”

Holly is 15 years old, Kit 25.  Holly’s father disapproves of the relationship.  Holly:  “Dad found out I been running around behind his back. He was madder than I ever seen him. His punishment for deceiving him: he went and shot my dog.”

Kit, in a confrontation with Holly’s father:  “Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?  Huh?  You want to hear what it sounds like?”   Later, he talks of the killing:  “He was provoking me when I popped him. Well that’s what it was like.  Pop.  I’m sorry.  I mean, nobody’s coming out of this thing happy.  Especially not us.  I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.”

Kit, after having shot his friend Cato:  “I got him in the stomach.”
Holly: “Is he mad?”
Kit:  “He didn’t say nothing to me about it.”

Like two children in a magical land, they go into the forest and build a tree house.  “We hid out in the wilderness down by the river in the grove of cottonwoods.  Being the flood season, we built our house in the trees.”   It’s an idyllic life, almost a fairy tale, until three bounty hunters arrive, and it all comes crashing down.

Kit Carruthers kills without emotion, remorse, or a twinge of conscience.  Holly observes with a child-like innocence,  never judging, never attempting to justify Kit’s actions.  “I’ve got to stick by Kit,” she says.  “He feels trapped.”

Martin Sheen considers Badlands his best work.  Sissy Spacek says the movie and her role in it changed the way she thought about film making.  “The artist rules,” she says.  “Nothing else matters.”

The two young lovers, Kit and Holly, are fascinating because stories like theirs fill our newspapers and tabloids.  We read about them, and we wonder how such things could happen.  No matter how precise the details of their lives, how horrendous their backgrounds, how deep the psychological studies, still we do not understand.  Charles Starkweather killed Caril Fugate’s parents and strangled her sister.  They hid the bodies and lived in the house for six days, until the grandmother got suspicious and called the police.  A woman in Orlando was accused of using chloroform to put her two-year-old child to sleep so she could party and not have to pay a baby sitter.  Lyle and Eric Menendez killed their parents with a 12-gauge shotgun so they wouldn’t have to wait for their inheritance.  Susan Smith drowned her two sons in the hope that men would find her more attractive, less “encumbered.”  Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson.  Killers all.

Malick shows us the face of a killer, and he is young, handsome, and charming.   He turns his camera on a pretty, red-haired girl who falls in love and follows her lover into the Badlands of Montana, until she tires of life on the run.

Badlands is a powerful movie.  A perfect blend of dialog, action, and setting, it’s as near to a perfect film as any I’ve ever seen.

In the forty years that followed the release of Badlands, Malick went on to write and direct four feature films:  Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011).   I look forward to seeing each of them.

The story begins in the year 2000 when Douglas Preston, journalist and author of crime thrillers, moved with his family to a villa in the Tuscan hills.  His plan was to write a murder mystery set in Florence.  Needing information about the Italian justice system, he contacted Mario Spezi, a journalist who had covered the local crime scene for twenty years.

The two met in a Florence cafe.  In the course of their conversation, Preston learned that the olive grove next to his house had been, years earlier, the scene of a double murder.  On a moonless night in August, 1968, Barbara Locci and her lover were shot to death in the front seat of their car.  Over the next seventeen years, six more couples were similarly killed, the women mutilated, body parts removed and carried off.   (Thomas Harris borrowed elements of these crimes to create the fictional character of Hannibal Lecter.)  A number of men were arrested for the murders, several prosecuted, and one convicted, though his conviction was later overturned.

Preston was intrigued.  He decided to shelve his novel and collaborate with Spezi on a non-fiction book about the serial killer who preyed on couples in the hills surrounding Florence.

Almost from the beginning, the two journalists ran into trouble.  The Italian police were not happy with these amateur sleuths nor with the criticism leveled at them.   Spezi’s articles revealed shoddy police work, promising leads left unexplored, blind alleys pursued with a vengeance that bordered on obsession.  Giuliano Mignini, the public prosecutor, and his investigators fought back. They ordered phone surveillance of the two journalists, bugged Spezi’s car, searched his apartment and seized all materials relating to the book and the investigation.  Mignini brought Preston in for questioning, accused him of perjury, and threatened to throw him in jail.  He arrested Spezi and held him for three weeks.

Amanda Knox’s name appears only at the very end of the book, yet you feel her presence throughout its pages.  The man who prosecuted her for the murder of her roommate in the flat in Perugia was none other than Giuliano Mignini, the same man who earlier accused Preston and Spezi of obstruction of justice, perjury, and planting false evidence.

Tom Cruise optioned The Monster of Florence shortly after its publication.  When the option lapsed, George Clooney picked it up.  According to Variety Magazine, Clooney intends to produce and possibly star in the movie.  If the screenwriters are faithful to the Preston/Spezi book, the movie will turn the Italian justice system on its ear.

Amanda Knox has been slandered unmercifully in the Italian press, tried, convicted, and sent to prison on the most tenuous evidence imaginable.  Mignini has accused her of being part of a Satanic cult and of participating in a sex orgy.  He has reportedly lied to her, struck her across the face, abused her both mentally and physically.  When her parents dared to question his treatment of their daughter, he accused them of slander and brought a lawsuit against them.

A prosecutor who would sue the parents of the girl he almost certainly wrongfully convicted of murder, that he would sue because they spoke out against his abusive treatment of their daughter, sue when they have mortgaged their home to defend her, is a prosecutor who should be removed from office.  Mignini has been willing to trample on the rights of journalists, to harass and imprison them for doing their jobs, and ultimately let a killer go free rather than tolerate criticism of his methods and tactics.

When, in January 2010, Giuliano Mignini was convicted of abuse of office and sentenced to 16 months in prison, he should have been required to serve that 16 months, rather than have his sentence suspended.   That he was allowed to go back to work as a prosecutor is an outrage.

Amanda Knox should be freed, pending charges against Preston, if they exist, should be dropped, the ongoing harassment and prosecution of Spezi ended.  The Monster of Florence may just be the ticket to accomplish these things.

Janusz is chained to a group of convicts and marched to a Siberian prison from which there is no escape.  But escape he does, with six other men.  A blinding snowstorm gives them cover, but once free of the camp, in desperate need of food, clothing, and shelter, they face the sheer impossibility of what they are attempting to do.  Only the knowledge that they cannot go back, and the goal of freedom, keep them going.  On their first night one of the men, Kazik, goes off in search of firewood and freezes to death.  They take comfort in the fact that he died a free man.

Peter Weir produced a film version of the story entitled “The Way Back.”  Using actual film footage from Soviet archives, he shows starving prisoners fighting for garbage, playing cards for each others’ few belongings, burying their clothes in snow to kill the lice.

No one has ever walked through Mongolia, yet these men do it, doggedly putting one foot after the other.  They must leave no mark of their passing, for fear of being captured and sent back.  Yet their need for clothing and food is constant.  At one point they fight off a group of wolves for the carcass of an animal.

In the Gobi desert they battle sandstorms, sunstroke, and dehydration, supporting those who falter, always moving southward toward freedom.  Ed Harris is the American subway worker caught in the Great Terror of 1937,  Colin Ferrell a Russian thug.  There’s an an accountant, a pastry chef/sketch artist, and a priest.  A girl named Irene joins them for a time.

Not all of the remaining six make it to India.  But some do.

The film is different from the book, as you might expect.  Each has its own strengths, its own unforgettable scenes, its own moral dilemmas.  Both book and film portray characters pushed to the limits of human endurance, yet they never lose their courage nor their determination.  Read the book or listen to it on CD, then stream, rent, or buy the DVD.  It’s a great story.

This book is the story of a woman who accused her father of sexual abuse, and later came to the realization that she lied. It is also a long-overdue examination of the McMartin Preschool molestation case of the 1980s, the women’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and the phenomenon of “repressed memory.” Maran is an expert at weaving her own story into the “climate” of the time. She has the rare ability to both examine and ultimately to understand how she was influenced and shaped by these various forces. The book is a triumph in that she is able finally to learn the truth about herself and act on it.

The McMartin case epitomizes the insanity that consumed the nation. There is no reasonable answer as to why so many people came to believe devil worshipers had set up shop in day-care centers across America. That 87-year-old Virginia McMartin, confined to a wheelchair, sexually molested two-year-olds in Manhattan Beach, California. That children were taken into underground tunnels and photographed in the nude.

Had we lost our collective minds? Did anyone think to question stories about pre-school teachers cutting heads off horses? Children flushed down toilets to emerge in secret rooms where they were abused and tortured, then cleaned up and reunited with their parents? Teachers flying through the air like witches on broomsticks?

There is sweet joy in the role of the victim. People feel sorry for you. They want to do things to help you. Maran recognizes that. She realizes she was enticed into the victim role, and she played it to the hilt.

Yet the book suffers from a flaw that exists in many memoirs. If you sit down to write the story of your life, you focus so much on yourself, you forget there are other people. In this case, there is the collateral damage done to Maran’s immediate and extended family: father, mother, step-mother, brother, sister-in-law, their two children, her two children.

In the end, Maran is still primarily concerned with herself. If only she can tell her father she is sorry, before Alzheimer’s completely removes him from her, things will be okay. But the pain she inflicted is too deep, too lasting, too brutal. Being sorry can’t begin to give him back what she took from him.