reviews
NONFICTION side, and his outdoor-writing bona fides are put to excellent use here. Astoria brings to life a harrowing era of American exploration. —AMY SCRIBNER
BLOOD WILL OUT
Under the spell of a con man
By Boyd Varty
R E V I E W B Y J O H N T. S L A N I A
Walter Kirn has penned a number of imaginative novels, including Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, which were both made into movies. But nothing in the pages of those books could match the bizarre, real-life experiences Kirn relates in his new memoir, Blood Will Out. Here is the Hollywood elevator pitch: Kirn befriends a con artist who passes himself off as an aristocrat, but turns out to be a murderer. Over a 15-year friendship, Kirn discovers he has more in common with this charlatan than he cares to acknowledge. Thus, Blood Will Out is as much a psychological thriller as it is a true crime tale. The story is full of surprises and strange twists from the beginning, where we find Kirn a promising young author living in Montana with his very young wife, Maggie. He is 34; she is 19. She also happens to be the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane. Kirn is struggling as a writer, popping Ritalin to complete a project, then Ambien By Walter Kirn to induce sleep. Maggie is pregnant and working in an animal shelter. A Liveright, $25.95, 272 pages disabled shelter dog is in need of a home, and a man identifying himself ISBN 9780871404510, audio, eBook available as Clark Rockefeller agrees to the adoption and will pay a generous fee to the person who delivers the crippled canine to New York City. So Kirn TRUE CRIME seizes the opportunity to drive the dog, incontinent and confined to a wheelchair, to meet this supposed scion of the wealthy East Coast family. Charmed by this dilettante, Kirn ignores all the warning signs throughout more than a decade of correspondence, phone calls and visits with Clark Rockefeller, who turns out to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant wanted in the murder of a California man and the disappearance of his wife. On one level, Blood Will Out is a murder mystery. But Kirn drills deeper, channeling his inner Fitzgerald to probe his own psyche. Kirn likens himself to a modern-day Nick Carraway, with Clark Rockefeller a later-day Jay Gatsby, who passes himself off as wealthy and erudite. Then Kirn wonders whether he is any better. Like Fitzgerald, Kirn was a naïve boy from Minnesota who ended up at Princeton. There, he developed an edgy persona, fueled by drugs and alcohol, to gain popularity as a writer, becoming a con man in his own way. Blood Will Out is equally dark, edgy, humorous and philosophical. Ultimately, it is a book that proves truth is stranger than fiction.
ASTORIA
R E A D M O R E AT B O O K PA G E . C O M
By Peter Stark
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Ecco $27.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062218292 Audio, eBook available
HISTORY
The damp practically floats off the pages in Astoria, the sweeping tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to settle the remote Pacific Northwest coast in 1810. Astor’s vast wealth enabled him to send two expeditions: one over land and one by ship. His plan was to set up a fur trade, the first on this particularly harsh stretch of the West Coast. Whoever could settle the area would lay claim to a vast area
rich with sea otter and beaver fur, salmon and other seafood. It’s hard to decide which party had the rougher journey. The overland party climbed snowy mountains, nearly starved and was attacked by Native Americans. The seafarers didn’t do much better, a motley crew of Americans and Scots who encountered rogue waves, endured water shortages and squabbled their way around Cape Horn to the rocky coastline where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. Author Peter Stark retraces the journey in spellbinding detail, making use of journals to get inside the minds of these explorers who set out just two years after Lewis and Clark successfully crossed the continent. “We climbed mountains so high that I could hardly believe our horses would get over them,” wrote Wilson Price Hunt, whom Astor chose
CATHEDRAL OF THE WILD
to lead the overland party. “We could advance only with the greatest difficulty because of the sharp rocks, and the precipices plunge to the very banks of the river.” Almost half of the 140 travelers died before ever laying eyes on Astoria. Those who did straggle in to the muddy settlement found something other than paradise awaiting them. “[I]magine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring,” Stark writes. “It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia—the infinite gray coastline stretches away backed by the thick, dark rainforest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs.” Stark is a correspondent for Out-
Random House $27, 304 pages ISBN 9781400069859 Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
It’s hard to know whether to call Boyd Varty’s Cathedral of the Wild a memoir, a true adventure story or a self-help book. All I know is that it made me cry with its hard-won truths about human and animal nature, distilled by Varty from his experiences living on Londolozi, the game reserve his family runs in South Africa. Londolozi began in 1926 when Varty’s great-grandfather bought the land to use as a hunting destination; when the land passed to Varty’s father and uncle, they began transforming it into a game conservation area. During South Africa’s apartheid era, Londolozi stood out as a place of unity and respect for all people, and it was where Nelson Mandela went to recuperate in 1990 after his imprisonment. It continues to operate today as a safari destination. The campfire stories Varty recounts of a childhood in the bush are by turns hilarious and harrowing. There’s the deadly black mamba snake slithering over young Boyd’s legs; he’s pounced on by an overenthusiastic young lion; he learns to drive a Land Rover at age 10 while his Uncle John shoots video footage of a charging elephant: experiences that taught Boyd how to keep calm and carry on in a crisis. The biggest threat to Varty’s family, however, comes not from wild animals but from desperate humans. A violent home invasion in Johannesburg traumatizes the family profoundly and prompts 18-yearold Boyd to leave Africa in search of healing. His quest takes him from Australia to India to the South American rain forest and finally, to a Native-American healing ceremony in Arizona. There he reconnects with