Gone Boy: A Walkabout

Rating:
Summary: Courage
Review: Any good parents worst NIGHTMARE, the early loss of a child. Gregory Gibson has the courage to take a hard, well written, look a himself and our society. If you have the courage it takes to do some honest thinking, READ THIS BOOK!

Rating:
Summary: Chthonic Depths and the Light of Hope
Review: As a personal journey--a man's search for answers about his son's murder--Gone Boy is superb. By avoiding the contemporary tendency to see experience through the lens of predictable, knowable, "normal" and generic psychological stages of grief, Gone Boy evades a trap which waylays many attempts to describe grief and healing. With a piercing honesty, Gregory Gibson does not avoid a few long, hard, deep looks into the darker--chthonic, say--side of his nature--and all our natures: the violence within. And so as the darkness of the experience is transformed into a kind of on-going enlightenment, the hard won hope rings true. Gregor, and in fact his whole family, never allow the darkness to get them. As the story of one event's expanding concentric circles, Gone Boy is also superb. In clear, vivid, often luminous prose, Gregor relates his experience of looking the vast, unknowable complexities--webs of interrelations-- surrounding his son's death straight in the eye. The complexities he examines most often arrive in the form of the actual people--the murderer's parents; the man who sold the murder weapon; a security guard wounded during the shooter's rampage; psychiatrists who interviewed the murderer; officials at the college at which the murder ocurred etc.--most intimately involved. Gregor does not treat these people as necessary but secondary players, stepping stones to his own self-analysis, but instead allows us to look into their eyes too, to see the pain, denial, struggles, and insights which each carries through a world irrevocably changed by the events which link them all.

Rating:
Summary: brave & eloquent
Review: For such a disturbing and sad subject, you are unable to take a break or put it down. It remains facinating and never falls into a "sob story". It is rational but allows you to feel every emotion along with the author. This book is a triumph!

Rating:
Summary: brave & eloquent
Review: Gone Boy, is Gregory Gibson's exploration of the facts and emotions surrounding the murder of his young son. As many other reviewers have remarked, it is beautifully written, thoughtful, and fascinating.

I expected the book to be a litany of complaints, wrongs, conspiracies and so-forth, and it was remarkably devoid of such histrionics. It was subtle and intelligent. Gibson's lack of histrionics makes the impact of his book all the stronger. His documentation of the incompetence of the Simon's Rock administration is bone-chilling.

One of the most interesting, and again, chilling, parts of the book was a description of his meeting with Leon Botstein, President of Bard College (to which Simon's Rock belongs). Yet, despite numerous reasons Gibson has to be disgusted with the performance of the Simon's Rock administration, he has managed to contain his anger enough to write a well-reasoned, moving book -- one that is at the same time a memorial to his son, and food for thought about violence in our society, our schools, and the domino-effect that each small decision can have in creating a tragedy.

Rating:
Summary: the unspoken victims
Review: Gregory Gibson takes the reader on a painful journey and makes it bearable.I appreciate his objectivity and honesty.No one can really understand what it is like to lose a loved one through murder but this book will bring you as close as possible.About the reviews chastising him for being angry:grieving people are angry,life has been pulled out from under them,control is gone, and yet the world marches on,rarely acknowledging their pain.That is part of the gift of this book,it is a real portrait of how prolonged grief is and how complicated.Maybe those naysayers were expecting some Oprahesque,shallow resolve.

Rating:
Summary: alright alright
Review: Gregory Gibson was awakened by every parents' worst nightmare...his son, Galen, has been shot and killed on the campus of the small college he was attending. Once the shock wore off, the only way he could cope and manage his grief was to go on a walkabout..a trip to discover the facts behind his son's senseless murder. As he sets out on his journey of discovery he lets us in on how he feels, how is family is handling the loss, the motives behind the quest. The very fact that he keeps changing and refocusing the intent of his search is a story of coming to terms with a senseless act and the finality of death. It is heartbreaking to hear him discribe his wife. Annie, as she finds comfort in the world of Publishers' Clearing House mailers, his children begin to venture out into the world. As the story unfolds, and Mr. Gibson finds more and more truth about Galen's death, he also comes in contact with the many people who had an unwitting role in his son's death, hears their story and the pain they also feel. People are not as you might think. It is a sad fact of life that many of the horrors of life do not have a pat explination ...sometimes we have to accept that evil does walk among us, and we try not to succumb to it's pull. It is a a triumph of spirit.

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking, tender
Review: Gregory Gibson was awakened by every parents' worst nightmare...his son, Galen, has been shot and killed on the campus of the small college he was attending. Once the shock wore off, the only way he could cope and manage his grief was to go on a walkabout..a trip to discover the facts behind his son's senseless murder. As he sets out on his journey of discovery he lets us in on how he feels, how is family is handling the loss, the motives behind the quest. The very fact that he keeps changing and refocusing the intent of his search is a story of coming to terms with a senseless act and the finality of death. It is heartbreaking to hear him discribe his wife. Annie, as she finds comfort in the world of Publishers' Clearing House mailers, his children begin to venture out into the world. As the story unfolds, and Mr. Gibson finds more and more truth about Galen's death, he also comes in contact with the many people who had an unwitting role in his son's death, hears their story and the pain they also feel. People are not as you might think. It is a sad fact of life that many of the horrors of life do not have a pat explination ...sometimes we have to accept that evil does walk among us, and we try not to succumb to it's pull. It is a a triumph of spirit.

Rating:
Summary: An emotional journey
Review: Once I started reading Gone Boy, I could not put it down. Many times the words were a blur as tears filled my eyes thinking of Mr. Gibson's pain. He writes in a style that bears his soul and makes him as vulnerable and racked with pain as you and I would be in the same situation. However, he deals with it in a most unique way, he trys to find out all he can about Galen's murder, from the mental state of his killer to the manufactuer of the ammunition and everything in between. The most fascinating aspect of it all is that Mr. Gibson searches for all the components of his son's murder and gives us a picture of how all of these fragments happened to come together in the same place and time on that tragic day. My heart goes out to him and his family. His story is a sad one but necessary for the healing process.

Rating:
Summary: Friends of Galen
Review: This is a difficult but neccessary book to read for anyone who knew Galen, or attended Simon's Rock. I left Simon's Rock a semester before the shooting. Gregory Gibson has actually undertaken the tasks that I contemplated repeatedly over the course of the last eight years, not only doing the legwork but also eloquently and honestly telling the story. This book is a service to anyone affected by the shooting, and to a society that desperately needs to learn these lessons. If you knew Galen-e-mail [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing
Review: This is an excellent self-portrait of one man's reaction to the violent death of his son. Readers expecting a true crime book in the current fashion will be disappointed. There are no great revelations, no detectives working to break the case, no shocking photographs. That is both its strength and its weakness ... it is far more honest than most true crime books, far less likely to try to wrench emotional reactions out of the reader. On the other hand, wading through other people's grief is edifying, but exhausting.

I left Simon's Rock the year before the shooting. Nothing surprised me much in the parts of the book dealing directly with Simon's Rock; the administration's actions (or lack thereof), and perhaps not even the shooting itself. The school, as another reviewer noted, was very much a sealed organism and prone to sealing off against the unwanted. Wayne Lo and his friends (for whom the idea of shooting someone was a way of relieving stress, not something to be actually *done*) were reacting, I think, to just that tendency.

It should be noted that, as Gibson says at the end of the book, that Wayne's parents are suffering the worst. They have lost their son without losing him.