Strange Piece of Paradise

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More About This Book

Overview

In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate took a cross-country bike trip. As they lay sleeping in the central Oregon desert, a man in a pickup truck deliberately ran over their tent and proceeded to attack them with an axe. The horrific crime was reported in newspapers across the country, but no one was ever arrested. Fifteen years later, Jentz returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered and makes an extraordinary discovery: the violence of that night is as present for the community as it is for her. Shockingly, many say they know who did it, and he is living freely in their midst.

Powerful, eloquent, and paced like the most riveting of thrillers, Strange Piece of Paradise is a startling profile of a psychopath, a sweeping reflection on violence and the myth of American individualism, and a moving record of Jentz's brave inner journey from violence to hope.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
"Creepy, compelling, hard to put down…" That's how our editors describe Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz's powerful account of the savage 1977 assault that derailed her life and started her on a long journey back to the past to find peace of mind. Severely injured by an axe-wielding stranger in the Oregon desert, Jentz found herself, 15 years later, "stuck" in time, unable to move forward and haunted by recurring dreams that finally compelled her to return to the scene of the unsolved crime. Expertly researched and beautifully described, this mesmerizing mix of memoir and true crime is as riveting as any James Patterson thriller.
J.D. Dolan
"The strongest parts of Jentz's story, though, are the connections she forged with her newfound allies -- women who were beaten and yet managed to overcome these indignities with grace, courage and strength; police officers who lived in the community and dealt with violence daily, and who genuinely wanted to bring closure to an old case; the two victims' advocates, tirelessly driving around in an RV, utterly fearless in their efforts to help others live by uncovering the truth. Jentz has bravely uncovered hers."
—LA Times Book Review
More Reviews (7) Fewer Reviews
James Wolcott
"Start this book, and you won't stop...In synopsis, Strange Piece of Paradise sounds like pulp fiction: 1977, two Yale students-hopeful and buoyant-embark upon a bike trip across the country's "most scenic blue roads" only to be brutally attacked at a campsite by a psycho stranger in cowboy boots who drives off into the desert night. But the story is true, the locations real, the scars left on the author's body bearing the track marks of her trauma. As if to perform reconstructive surgery on her psyche (to reconcile the adventurous young woman she was with the "scarecrow self" that has haunted her since), Jentz returns to the scene of the crime to conduct an epic investigation as shadowed in grief and as stricken by violence as Truman Capote's Kansas in In Cold Blood."
—Vanity Fair columnist and author of The Catsitters
Mary Roach
"Imagine that it had been Truman Capote himself who'd been savaged in Holcomb, Kan., and that he had lived to describe his ordeal. That is the level of command and sinew at work in the writing."
—The New York Times Book Review
Samantha Dunn
"With STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE, Jentz presents the cure for the common memoir, a form of literature recently diminished in the public eye by writers who could not or would not do the heavy lifting Jentz so thoroughly tries here. She employs the diligence of a journalist in reconstructing the verifiable facts of these events, the analysis of a social scientist in reviewing her data, and the heart of a philosopher in considering the implications of the facts... PARADISE is not a memoir that's been packaged into an easy story; this is more a series of meditations, a constellation of insights given so the reader comes away not with answers but with profound questions. And that is precisely what the form of memoir was designed to deliver."
—Ms. Magazine
USA Today
"Part true crime, part memoir, part a profile of a stone-cold sociopath, and part an exploration of violence and its effect on people and communities, Jentz's book is tough to read-and even tougher to put down."
Publishers Weekly
The author was a Yale student biking cross-country during the summer of 1977 when she and her roommate were attacked by an axe-wielding cowboy while camping in Oregon. Jentz escaped with a gashed arm, while her friend was nearly blinded from head injuries. Fifteen years later, in 1992, Jentz returns to the scene of the attack to repair the psychic wound and attempt to close the case. Dogged in her pursuit of the truth (though largely abandoning the subtitle's promise of introspection), Jentz interviews the witnesses who saw her stumble out of Cline Falls State Park that June night; she scrutinizes police files and discovers the halfhearted investigation of suspects, learning about several horrific killings that took place in Oregon then. Jentz even befriends the former girlfriends of one suspect who becomes frighteningly plausible as the culprit. She finally tracks down the local cowboy known for carving his initials into his axe handle; though he can no longer be prosecuted for the attack, the satisfaction of seeing him convicted for another offense is a bittersweet vindication. While a thorough, forthright detective, screenwriter Jentz tends to meander and includes unnecessary detail. Still, her story is chilling and will enthrall true crime readers. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This book opens 15 years after a horrifyingly brutal assault in which Jentz and a Yale classmate, asleep at an Oregonian campground, were first run over and then attacked by a hatchet-wielding stranger. Jentz first returned to Oregon in 1992 to reclaim the self she lost at 19 and conduct her own investigation into the crime, for which no one was ever prosecuted. Her story is simultaneously riveting and disturbing-not an embellished memoir but a straightforward, chronological account based on notes, crime reports, newspaper accounts, hospital records, lab reports, and the author's own memory of events. Piece by piece and with the help of the suspect's abused former girlfriends and others living in the area at the time, she builds a solid case against her alleged attacker and gains self-confidence and courage, eventually becoming a victims' rights advocate. This eloquent, brilliantly written book addresses random violence in American culture, the justice system, the glorification of those who commit crimes, and the corresponding diminishment of its victims. The pacing and subject matter will keep readers mesmerized throughout the book's nearly 600 pages. An extraordinary story from a gifted writer; strongly recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/06.]-Lisa Nussbaum, formerly with Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Attacked while asleep in a tent during a cross-country bicycle trip, the author returned to Oregon years later to investigate the crime and to search for the assailant, who was never apprehended. The June 22, 1977, attack was grisly. A man drove his pickup through the tent, backed over Jentz and her college roommate Shayna, then went after them with an axe. The author, now a screenwriter, did not see the attacker's face, only his oddly neat cowboy attire. Shayna, who sustained a life-threatening head wound, continues to have no memory of the assault. Jentz is relentless in her pursuit of Dirk Duran (a name that, like others in this account, she has changed), a strikingly handsome but volatile young man who lived near the crime scene, a roadside park called Cline Falls. Some local people suspected Duran because of his unstable, abusive behavior, but, for reasons that the author explores, the police did not investigate him closely. Jentz did. With the help of two committed friends, she interviewed many who knew Duran, including co-workers, relatives and women he'd abused. Eventually, she pieced together not only the details of the crime but also Duran's twisted, vicious history. In one striking scene, years after the attack, Jentz goes to watch Duran's trial on another charge. (The statute of limitations had expired in her own case.) He knows she's been on his trail, and their eyes meet. The author is meticulous about detail; she read countless newspaper articles, court and hospital documents; she drove up lonely, remote roads to find people who might provide only a single nail for the edifice she was erecting. But her overlong account should have been substantially trimmed, and thefrequent passages of pop psychology are amateurish. An emotional piece of investigative work, vitiated in places by prolixity and psycho-cliches.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312426699
  • Publisher: Picador
  • Publication date: 3/15/2007
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 752
  • Sales rank: 694,171
  • Product dimensions: 5.45 (w) x 8.26 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Terri Jentz is a screenwriter and lives in Los Angeles. This is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz. Copyright © 2006 by Terri Jentz. Published in May 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Dangerous Summer’s Night

Poised on that twilight edge between life and death, I felt intimately the part of me that was flesh, and I knew also that I was something more.

I came to that insight early on. I was scarcely twenty.

It was 1977, a drought year in the American West, the driest year in recorded history, although history in those parts went back only a hundred years.

Back then, all of America was in a drought. The fever dream of the sixties had simmered down and the country had lost its way. The national mood was dispirited, in recovery from shocks and traumas, pinched by stagnation and inflation. Fatalism shadowed sunny American optimism.

Gas prices had never been higher. But I didn’t care. I was riding a bike.

America was hardly past its two hundredth birthday as I was nearing my twentieth. Its bicentennial year called for celebrations to restore a sense of the nation’s magic and promise. Out of that came a bicycle trail, the BikeCentennial, forged from coast to coast through America’s most spectacular countryside. My college roommate and I were riding the trail on our summer vacation. Encouraged by the 1970s culture to strive for self-discovery, we were hoping that the song of the open road would enlarge life’s meaning.

In the Cascades of the Northwest, drought conditions were melting the glaciers left from the last ice age. The mountain passes cleared unusually early in the summer of ’77 and allowed us to scale the highest pass. On the seventh day of our journey, we rode up through green rain forest. At the summit, a field of lava, night-black, surrounded us from every direction, as if a devastating fire had burned through only yesterday. Breathing in the air of the heights, we headed down. Trees abruptly appeared again. Only now they were reddish desert trees.

We set up our tent along a river in a small park in a desert of juniper and sage, and bedded down for the night. It was Wednesday, June 22, the summer solstice. As the earth slowly turned in the dark, Americans in one time zone after the next settled in front of their TVs, safe in their living rooms. They watched the CBS Wednesday-night movie, the world television premiere of a dark and unsettling Western, one of those edgy films made in the seventies that reflected the mood of national cynicism. It was a film complete with psychopaths and moral degeneracy, a new American mythology that turned the romantic version of the Old West on its head.

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 stepped 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.

Customer Reviews

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( 11 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 11 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted February 20, 2010

    Terrifying true story of a crime that happened in a small High Desert town in Central Oregon, and a woman who had the courage to investigate it herself after it was basically "swept under the carpet" by the local Police.

    Being from the area and living there when this happened, I felt compelled to read this book. Thank you Terri for writing this book so we finally know what really happened, so many years later. It was minimally covered by the media for reasons previously unknown, or maybe I should say unspoken. This is one book that had my complete attention (and how) all the while I was reading it..and beyond.

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  • Posted October 14, 2009

    Horrible

    This book is one of the most boring I have ever read. I made myself finish it simply because I do not like to leave things unfinished, yet getting to the end was nothing short of torture. Jentz comes off as arrogant and whiney. Skip this for your own good.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 3, 2009

    Too Long...Too Repetitive...

    Where was the editor for this book?!? I couldn't get through it...I was bored to death and highly frustrated with the repetition. And it's almost as if the author tried too hard with her descriptions. I don't need two or three adjectives before every noun. I was excited to read this book, thinking it was going to be good. What a disappointment.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 30, 2008

    Had to put it down...

    ...because it was boring, repetative, uninteresting, disappointing. I thought this book would be a good read since it was written by a victim of crime. In reality it seemed to just be her alternative to physchological help after the fact. I had to put it away after getting through maybe one-fourth of the book. It appears, to me, that the author just figured she'd give it a try and hope for the best. Unfortunately she probably made a ton of money off of a poorly written and unsubstantial piece of work and I'm sorry that I was a contributor!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 22, 2007

    Too much in one work

    This was a difficult book to review. It was three books in one. As a true crime story, following a twisting and turning path to solving a mystery, it was excellent, a four or a five star. As a writing example, while extremely well written, it was verbose. It reminded me of The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn, a book of unraveling a mystery which could have been handled in far fewer pages. Ms. Jentz's style seemed to use twenty words where five would do, and to describe over and over the same subject. For that effort, the book earns a three. As a political tome, while cursading on social issues is fine 'we all have our agendas', her portrayal of all abusers being men and all abuse victims being women is simplistic and erroneous. In her situation her suspect was an abuser of people and she even presents some examples. But she still concludes that it is the women who need protecting and the men who need punishment. For that she gets a one. Add the stars up and you get the rating above. The problem with this work, excluding its length, is that it turns from being a search for discovery into a sexist crusade against all men. Too bad. No one can argue against punishing the male abuser, or the female abuser, but in this work the female abuser does not exist. A couple hundred less pages, and a more even handed dealing with the the subject of people harming others, would have improved this work and raised the rating.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 3, 2007

    Brevity, the soul of wit

    'Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.' ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet 'If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.' ~Dennis Roth My point? This book is about two hundred pages too long. Ms. Jentz's story is fascinating but could really use some editing. What bothered me most about this book is that you suffer through more than 500 pages only to find out that their is no resolution. She never really find out who tried to kill her. She has a pretty good idea, but as far as I can tell, this idea is based on a lot of heresy and small town gossip. If you like concise true crime writing without a lot of rambling over every minute thought and detail, check out the book A Rip in Heaven by Jeanine Cummings. It's an amazing tale of courage and self discovery, not self-absorption.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 24, 2006

    Exceptional Writing/Captivating

    I've never been pulled into a book ever as much as I have Strange Piece of Paradise and so surprised by my reaction to it. It actually made me so anxious, I had to put the book down for a while so that my breathing would return to a normal rythym. It made me cry, gave me goose bumps and I actually felt as though I was in the park when the girls were being rescued. Exceptional writing on the Author's part and I think it would make a great movie although I think it would be unbearable for the victims. Thanks for such great reading.

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    Posted September 6, 2011

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    Posted January 18, 2010

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    Posted August 29, 2011

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    Posted January 20, 2010

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