A Memoir: Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere
A Memoir
Cheryl Strayed & Poe Ballantine
On Sale: 09/03/2013 | $17.95
9780983477549 | Paperback 5-1/2 x 9 | 282 pages
Book Description
FOR READERS OF IN COLD BLOOD AND MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL
This work of true crime as memoir is as much of an investigation of a shocking murder as it is a portrait of small-town Americaand the folks that make their homes there—and a deeply moving examination of parenting an autistic child
For well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they built a family with their son, who was red-flagged as autistic.
But this quiet life is disruptd when one day in 2006, his neighbor, Steven Haataja, a math professor from the local state college, disappears. Ninety-five days later, the professor was found bound to a tree, burned to death in the hills behind the campus where he had taught. No one, law enforcement included, understood the circumstances. Though Ballantine had never contemplated writing mystery or true crime, this murder was too close to home to ignore.
With this intimate knowledge—and occasional friendships—with all the players, the suspects, the sheriff, and the police involved, Ballantine and his son set out together to find out what might have happened to the professor and uncover who is ultimately responsible.
Praise For This Book
"Poe Ballantine is brilliant, sensitive, unique, and universal. Reading his work is inspiring, agitating, and invigorating. He is utterly transparent on the page, a rare thing. He's like a bird that's almost but not quite extinct. This is his best book ever." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild"Poe Ballantine's prose cuts right to the bone (the one that's stuck in America's throat), but manages to preserve not only the sweetest meat but the barbecue sauce, as well. Mark Twain would have admired his wit, and had Oscar Wilde read him, he would have bought an old Ford pickup and moved to Nebraska the day he got out of the slammer, hoping that some of his style rubbed off on him. A book without style is like a swan without feathers—it's just another plucked chicken—but this new one of Ballantine's is in its funky way majestic as it zigzags downstream. Poe Ballantine is the most soulful, insightful, funny, and altogether luminous 'under-known' writer in America. He knocks my socks off, even when I'm barefoot." —Tom Robbins, author of Villa Incognito
"Ballantine's writing is secure insecurity at its best, muscular and minimal, self-deprecating on the one hand, full of the self's soul on the other.” —Lauren Slater, author of Lying
"If the delights of either Poe Ballantine or Chadron, Nebraska were a secret, that is over now. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere is an unprecedented combination of all of the following: true crime page-turner, violently funny portrait of a tiny Western town, field guide to saving a bilingual marriage and raising an autistic child, sutra on living with open mind and big heart. Many of the sentences start on earth and end somewhere in beat-poet heaven. Ballantine comes ever closer to being my favorite creative nonfiction writer and this is why." —Marion Winik, author of Above Us Only Sky and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
