Nonfiction

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands

Filed Under: Books Read

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands by Jon Billman
Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 7, 2020
Pages: 368
Format: ebook
Genres: Domestic Politics, Environment, Nature, True Crime
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

For readers of Jon Krakauer and Douglas Preston, the critically acclaimed author and journalist Jon Billman's fascinating, in-depth look at people who vanish in the wilderness without a trace and those eccentric, determined characters who try to find them.
These are the stories that defy conventional logic. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidences, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks. These are the missing whose situations are the hardest on loved ones left behind. The cases that are an embarrassment for park superintendents, rangers and law enforcement charged with Search & Rescue. The ones that baffle the volunteers who comb the mountains, woods and badlands. The stories that should give you pause every time you venture outdoors.
Through Jacob Gray's disappearance in Olympic National Park, and his father Randy Gray who left his life to search for him, we will learn about what happens when someone goes missing. Braided around the core will be the stories of the characters who fill the vacuum created by a vanished human being. We'll meet eccentric bloodhound-handler Duff and R.C., his flagship purebred, who began trailing with the family dog after his brother vanished in the San Gabriel Mountains. And there's Michael Neiger North America's foremost backcountry Search & Rescue expert and self-described "bushman" obsessed with missing persons. And top researcher of persons missing on public wildlands Ex-San Jose, California detective David Paulides who is also one of the world's foremost Bigfoot researchers.
It's a tricky thing to write about missing persons because the story is the absence of someone. A void. The person at the heart of the story is thinner than a smoke ring, invisible as someone else's memory. The bones you dig up are most often metaphorical. While much of the book will embrace memory and faulty memory--history--The Cold Vanish is at its core a story of now and tomorrow. Someone will vanish in the wild tomorrow. These are the people who will go looking.

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

Filed Under: Books Read

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Published by Hachette Books on January 21, 2020
Pages: 336
Format: ebook
Genres: Criminal Justice, Memior, Nonfiction, True Crime
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

In the afternoon or early evening of June 25, 1980, two young women, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, were killed in an isolated clearing in rural Pocahontas County West Virginia. They were hitchhiking to an outdoor peace festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, but never arrived. Their killings have been called “The Rainbow Murders.”
For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted, though suspicion was cast on a succession of local men. In 1993, the state of West Virginia convicted a local farmer named Jacob Beard and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Later, it emerged that a convicted serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin had also confessed. With the passage of time, as the truth behind the Rainbow killings seemed to slip away, its toll on this Appalachian community became more concrete—the unsolved murders were a trauma, experienced on a community scale.
Emma Copley Eisenberg spent five years re-investigating these brutal acts, which once captured the national media’s imagination, only to fall into obscurity. A one-time New Yorker who came to live in Pocahontas Country, Eisenberg shows how that crime, a mysterious act of violence against a pair of middle-class outsiders, came to loom over several generations of struggling Appalachians, many of themlaborers who earned a living farming, hauling timber, cutting locust posts, or baling hay—and the investigators and lawyers for whom the case became a white whale.
Part “Serial”-like investigation, part Joan Didion-like meditation, the book follows the threads of this crime through the history of West Virginia, the Back-to-the-Land movement, and the complex reality contemporary Appalachia, forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class, and its violence.

“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir

Filed Under: Books Read

The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir

The Adventurer's Son: A Memoir by Roman Dial
Published by HarperCollins on February 18, 2020
Format: audiobook
Genres: Memior, Nonfiction
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

A brave and marvelous book. A page-turner that will rip your heart out.--Jon Krakauer
In the tradition of Into the Wild comes an instant classic of outdoor literature, a riveting work of uncommon depth. I'm planning on doing 4 days in the jungle. . . . It should be difficult to get lost forever: These were the haunting last words legendary adventurer Roman Dial received from his son, before the 27-year old disappeared into the jungles of Costa Rica. This is Dial's intensely gripping and deeply moving account of his two-year quest to unravel the mystery of his son's fate.
In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, twenty-seven-year-old Cody Roman Dial, the son of preeminent Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial, walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica's remote Pacific Coast that shelters miners, poachers, and drug smugglers. He carried a light backpack and machete. Before he left, he emailed his father: I am not sure how long it will take me, but I'm planning on doing 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. I'll be bounded by a trail to the west and the coast everywhere else, so it should be difficult to get lost forever.
They were the last words Dial received from his son.
The Adventurer's Son recreates the author's two-year quest to learn the truth about his child's disappearance. Immediately after Cody Roman's planned departure date passed without a word from him, Dial set off for Costa Rica. As he trekked through the dense jungle, interviewing locals and searching for clues--the authorities suspected murder--the desperate father was forced to confront the deepest questions about his own life. Roman had raised his son to be fearless, to seek out adventure amid earth's wildest places. Was he ultimately responsible for his son's fate?
A harrowing story of drama, adventure, and a father's love for his son, set in the most beautiful and dangerous reaches of the planet, The Adventurer's Son is a mystery, the memoir of a father and his son, and an unforgettable story of love and profound loss.