Rest in Peace, Johnny Tapia

For all of us who have struggled, this man is such an inspiration. He will be missed by many, in Albuquerque and throughout the world.


This amazing piece originally appeared in The Cruelest Sport blog. Creative nonfiction at its best:

UNDER SATURN: Johnny Tapia 1967-2012

May 30th, 2012 at 7:04 pm by Carlos AcevedoBoxing

Home » Boxing » UNDER SATURN: Johnny Tapia 1967-2012

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****

1.

“The past is inevitable.” Delmore Schwartz

2.

Look: there he is, a faraway blur, caught for an instant in the slipstream of time. Is it ESPN or USA? Is it 1989 or 1990? There are mullets in the crowd, oversized glasses, some Zubaz, maybe. The picture is scratched and grainy, like a silent film or something viewed in a kinetoscope, but you can still see the tattoo of Christ on his chest. Years later his body will be scarred by a wickerwork pattern of ink, but for now this stark image–set against skin as pale as alabaster–is made all the more startling by its solitude over two decades ago. Fast hands, quick feet, a full head of hair, a nose not yet misshapen by the rigors of his profession. A knotted heart behind the crown of thorns. He is handsome still. Sallow, yes, from hours in the gym and a lifetime under Saturn. They called him “The Baby-Faced Assassin.” Watch as he moves in for the kill. Sin City or Albuquerque? Can you remember? Get closer to the flickering image, washed out now in sepia, pixels leached by passing years. You will never see this man again.

3.

What Johnny Tapia accomplished in the ring is nearly as surprising as the fact that he lived as long as he did. Because the truth is, Tapia was past his physical peak by the time he beat Henry Martinez in 1994 to win his first title. From late 1990 to early 1994, Tapia was on a forced leave of absence from boxing. This was not a Muhammad Ali layoff—college lectures and time spent in mosques; nor was it a Mike Tyson layoff—three squares a day in the Indiana Youth Center. No, after Johnny Tapia had his license revoked in 1991 for failing drug tests, it was years of heroin, coke, methamphetamines, homelessness or holding tanks, smokers in Albuquerque dives, gunshots, gutters, and grief. Little by little Tapia whittled himself away. “I didn’t have a dollar in my pocket and didn’t know where I was,” Tapia told the Santa Fe New Mexican about his season in hell. “I had nowhere to go, nothing to eat.” A decade earlier, another bantamweight—Frankie Duarte—emerged from a skid-row nightmare to thrill delirious crowds at The Forum in Inglewood. They showered the ring with coins when he fought. But Duarte never won a world title. He had seen too many blue hours and way too many yesterdays. Just like Johnny Tapia. But Tapia was made for it, if you can ever figure out what “it” really was.

4.

Johnny Tapia had been killing himself—off and on, now and then, here and there—for years. Addicted to drugs, to prizefighting, to adrenalin rushes, and, finally, addicted to near-death experiences, Tapia was a junkie in a way that most junkies are not. Like a phoenix he rose from the ashes more often than anyone has a right to. Finally, he got it right. Or Death did. Between his battles with a beckoning grave, Tapia lived inside the ring. Call his sordid life a waste if you want; but for some of us, maybe, it was a gift.

5.

Sadism, whether one admits it or not, is an essential part of boxing. So is masochism. Johnny Tapia took more punches than necessary, perhaps to hear the roar of the crowd, perhaps for reasons altogether darker. He used to wipe his face during combat and lick the blood from his gloves.

6.

“Beatings. That’s all there was sometimes. That’s how it went. I got constant beatings. Half the beatings I took were for somebody else. There were lots of beatings on everybody, but especially on me. So many beatings, I got used to them….I drew the beatings like a magnet and they just made me stronger. And sometimes, to be truthful, it was the only way I didn’t feel the pain. The pain of being alone. The pain of being without my mother.”

7.

Tapia is diagnosed as bipolar. He suffers from ADD. He is depressed and suicidal. Dysfunction is his God. His mother is viciously murdered when he is eight years old. He is pitilessly abused as a child. His father, whom Tapia did not meet until 2010, is locked up in prison. Like Jake LaMotta, whose father forced him to fight in smokers as a child, Tapia is pitted by his uncles against other children in his neighborhood for the benefit of adult wagering. Albuquerque is a “Target City” in the 1980s—federal grants pour in to fight a drug epidemic that leaves Duke City morgues overwhelmed with graying dead.

8.

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
–Sylvia Plath

9.

John Lee Tapia is born on Monday, February 13, 1967. He liked to say that he was born on Friday the 13th, but no one needs poetic license for such a lifetime of tragedy.

10.

October 1991: License revoked after failing his third drug test. April 1992: Charged with threatening a witness in a murder trial. February 1993: Arrested for driving under the influence. Mid-1993: overdoses on the night of his wedding and is declared clinically dead. July 1994: Charged with trying to sell drugs to an off-duty policeman. October 1995: Weapons felony charges. August 1996: Police arrest rioters during his bout against Hugo Soto. March 1997: Charged with weapons possession in California. June 2000: Shot at during a road rage incident. July 2000: Hospitalized for depression. August 2000: Charge with assault. January 2003: Felony drug paraphernalia charges. December 2003: A drug overdose leaves Tapia on life support. March 2007: Overdoses and slips into a coma. February 2009: Arrested on drug charges. April 2009: Begins serving time at the Central New Mexico Corrections Facility. April 2010: Back in jail on drug charges. December 2010: Files for bankruptcy. January 2012: Arrested for DWI after crashing his SUV. May 27, 2012: dead. May 28, 1975: Virginia Tapia dies after four days in a coma.

11.

He was a criminal….But who will close the gates of mercy? Monsignor John L. Bedford

12.

“The night she died I saw her taken away. I was eight years old, pounding on the windowpane, yelling for help, but nobody believed what I saw. There was nothing I could do and so she died. And I’ve been blue ever since. And ever since I haven’t known if I should live or die. That’s the god’s honest truth. That’s the only way I can say it. As long as my mother’s in heaven, there’s a calling for me to go.”

Dolls & Other Ghosts: a photoessay

Once there was a girl...

Who found someone to love her...

and she knew happiness for a little while.

Until she realized that her hand was held by a shadow...

...and really she was all alone...

...and that made her feel...

...like she was behind a screen and heavy black bars...

...and getting further & further away...

...until her heart split down the middle...

And she left.

All photos by Heidi Utz, fall 2007

A Remembrance of Bookstores Past

Nicholas Hoare, Toronto

A decade ago one of our semi-largish city's mega bookstores was crammed to the gills with not only the newest and most enticing, but a selection of back list so huge I could barely take it all in in one visit. I won’t name names here, but this well-respected independent store once felt like a very good reason to live in a city: because resources like this existed.

Tonight I decided to pay it a visit, eagerly anticipating a hit of "big-city culture." Here in the land where mediocrity can be neither spelled nor defined,  I should have known I was shooting the moon. But as I started browsing, I quickly realized that this place was a shadow of its former self. First of all, no one was in it. (OK, Tues. night, but still…) Second of all, it held a LOT fewer books--and a lot fewer shelves, sparsely filled. The few lonely books appeared to be huddling together for warmth, with big gaps around them. Around the square-footage strode a small pack of roving booksellers, loudly accosting customers, asking them what they were looking for, and practically begging for the opportunity to drag them to the book. It was unseemly, obnoxious, and made me long for those rat’s nest bookstores where the employees keep their heads bent down over Spinoza and don’t utter a single word unless you beseech them. As I walked in to Anonymous Bookstore One, the cashier/greeter even let loose a fist pump, expressing approval of my T-shirt. Sigh. I guess if I’m hoping for comportment, I should do my book shopping in Boston instead of Relentlessly Blue Collarquerque.

Gotham Book Mart, NYC

Tangentially, as I stood on line for our monthly library book sale last weekend, I overheard a dealer saying that most of the smaller bookstores in NYC, save The Strand, had closed. And The Strand’s stock is apparently now quite different, much less obscure, more oriented toward bestsellers than it used to be. I recalled all the cute little shops we used to browse—Mysteries and More, the Gotham Book Mart (“Wise men fish here”), Coliseum Books, the gay bookstore in the West Village—and began to ponder their fates. Then of course I needed to know…Googled, and gulped. I realized that if the axe had swung on all these venerable shops in the heart of the civilized world, the rest of the country is somewhere between life support and Last Rites.

Livraria Lello, Oporto, Portugal

I’m trying to believe that the booksellers' demise is NOT related to the “dumbing down of America.” I’m trying to believe that people are NOT reading fewer books because they’re doing their reading online. I’m trying to believe that it’s NOT about the fact that an increasing number of kids graduate high school barely knowing how to read. But as I walk around this airy square footage, it’s like hiking through a clear-cut forest. And then an ugly little voice whispers, “Enjoy it now. In the future, this will be a fond memory.” The memory of when you used to be able to go browse in a bookstore. To pick up titles of interest and scan them without necessarily buying them. To carry a book to a table and pore over it while sipping tea. To take it home the same night you bought it and read it right away.

I realized that what I was standing in was a dearly loved piece of my past 50 years—one that might not continue into the future. And it made me extremely sad.

I don’t want to live in an über-digital world in which little is tangible. Specifically, I don’t want to live in a world in which media isn’t tangible. I like being able to pick up a volume I own and see the notes I made, or the coffee stains, or even just the bookmark at where I stopped reading. This taps directly into memory, evoking a whole time in my life—the week or month when I was reading this book, what was happening around me. Was I reading it in bed with my lover? Were we reading it over the phone to each other? Was I using it to comfort me during a time when I felt alone? Was it the volume that made me decide to enter my spiritual practice? Was it the book I carried in my backpack while hiking the Appalachian Trail?

Proust 1, Nook 0

These recollections simply don’t happen from seeing a book as a file on a Kindle. Even Marcel Proust could not wring a memory out of a Nook download. These memories emerge via seeing, touching, and smelling a book. Or a record album. Though my albums are currently in storage, I could pull them out tomorrow and each would bring back a part of my life and a deluge of memories. I might even be able to tell you why its cover had that stain, crease, or tear on it. Try that with your iPod.

It’s sad to realize that the almighty price point has killed yet another institution that many of us have held sacred throughout our lives. One that provided not only books, but community and the chance to see human eyeballs (even if their owners fist-pumped you at the register). And yet, it’s also tough to live in an economy so poor that it’s made people choose between buying a book or buying groceries. As much as it’s easy to rant, “Why don’t those idiots support their local bookstore instead of buying online?!” it’s also tough to justify paying $35. for a hardcover when you’ve seen it on Amazon for a penny—especially when you’re $100 short on the rent and that hardcover costs 5 hours of your pay.

My point is not to find something or someone to blame. (If that were my point, I’d quite certainly opt for George W. Bush.) My point is to express sadness for a part of the world that I’ll really miss when it’s gone. Sure, life goes on. We can all sit in our dark houses alone and scroll through the latest Danielle Steele on our Kindles. But if that’s what it comes to, please take my carcass out back and toss me to the wolves.

**Please note that the Canadian and Portuguese bookstores shown above have not gone out of business. I show them only as examples of how amazing bookstores can be.

Cheryl Strayed's Walk on the Wild Side

  Disclaimer: It’s tough to dispassionately review a book when someone else seems to be writing your life. When you share so much geographical and emotional common ground that it becomes both compelling and a bit scary to read the evidence. You’ve been their shadow—or have they been yours? But shared experience is a tricky thing. What if they tell the tale all wrong? Arrive at distinctly different conclusions? Botch the job? Conversely… what if this stranger seems to shoulder the very thing you thought was yours alone to bear? What if they uncover something you’ve never realized? Shine a light on the most painful part of your past such that you recognize your own strength in having endured it? This may be the ultimate goal in reading: to find a kindred spirit who helps you better understand your own journey. And while not everyone has shared this particular junket, I’m sure that its major themes will resonate for many.

Wild. The very word connotes the primordial ooze, a place where ideas are born in the midst of the natural world, where there’s freedom to go places we wouldn’t in everyday life. Where we are released into something that frees us to explore parts of ourself we hadn’t known before, and in the process stand eye-to-eye with many things that scare us. Indeed, wilderness is the land of the real, not the land of the metaphorical challenge. And for most of us framed into the workaday world, it’s a place in which we spend little time, as life seems to demand riding the conveyor belt of familiarity.

From this world, author Cheryl really did stray, changing her name for a reason: a determination to depart from the life she was given and to shape hers in radically different ways than what seemed her fate. This passage began when she lost the mother she adored to cancer at the age of 22. My own mom died of breast cancer when I was about the same age, and it remains the single most painful event of my life. After 9 years of caring for her, I can well-relate to the psychic chaos that descends when Strayed realizes how very different life will look without her mother’s anchoring presence. As I did, the author spends several years feeling completely adrift, wandering. She attempts to assuage her grief through a marriage to which she can’t commit, affairs, heroin, and frequent “geographical cures.” Nothing seems to ease the anguish. But as she spirals downward, a book about thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) appears, and she reads it cover-to-cover.

While this might not sound odd to an REI geek, Strayed is no veteran hiker. At the age of 26, she’s young, passably fit, acquainted but not intimate with the outdoors—and motivated to believe that several months on the trail could give her perspective on her life and a literal path forward.

Strayed embraces her solo-hike the way any young adult might: heavy on enthusiasm, light on practicality. For starters, there’s her pack, “Monster,” which must have tipped the scales at 75-80 pounds when Strayed began straying. In fact, she spends many pages describing how exceedingly difficult it was just to carry the Monster on her back. While this scenario bleeds metaphor, and readers her parents’ age will find it annoyingly short-sighted, it becomes a significant part of her proving her mettle. What she lacks in executive function, she seems to make up for in raw tenacity. And her ability to endure misery reacquaints her with her own inner resources.

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

In the summer of 2008, when I was working through my seemingly doomed relationship with a person I deeply loved, I bounded into the Pacific Northwest with the tempest of my confusion. And as echoes of our endless fights rang in my ears, I distinctly remember walking the PCT craving healing, wanting to give all the words I’d misspoken and things I’d done wrong to the redwoods that bathed me in their consoling, ancient presence. Like Strayed, I welcomed the uncomplicated clarity that walking in nature conferred on me, the simplicity of trees that had weathered so many storms and yet still stood upright, keening toward the summer sky.

As a writer, Strayed does many things well, and her technique is so subtle that readers might not realize just how skilled she is. She seamlessly weaves flashbacks to the specifics of her mom’s death with present-day narrative, which is hard to do well. It feels like the reverie a hiker enters when a tree, rock, or cloud evokes memory recalled to the rhythm of foot touching dirt.

Of the many evocative scenes in the book, one stands out as one of the saddest and most poignant I’ve ever read. In it, Strayed realizes her mother’s favorite horse must be put down, and her family must be the ones to do the deed. But when the aged horse refuses to succumb, Strayed’s fantasy of her mother’s riding Lady to the other side devolves into the harsh light of killing a beloved family pet. After I read it, I literally threw the book across the room. One of death's many aftershocks is realizing that you’re still earthbound, and need to deal with the things that were so precious to the person you loved.

But Wild is not emotionally overwrought or desperate, in the ways that Eat, Pray, Love can be every now and then. And while the female body count on the PCT may increase in the next few years, the book is not as overtly feminist, or urging, in its tone. God willing, there will be no commercial tours following in the author’s footsteps, as there have been with EPL. And though I adore EPL, I find Strayed’s comparative restraint a good thing. Though not as gooey and effusive as Gilbert’s can be, her insights are spot-on.

I like this passage:

“I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke. That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have and always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world.”

Like Gilbert, Strayed ultimately derives a profound sense of self-acceptance from her long journey. In one revelatory paragraph, she begins to get that she can forgive herself for betraying her husband. “What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all of those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was also what had got me here?”

This was the graf that took the 500-pound backpack of guilt I’d also been shouldering and left it by the side of the road. Because, of course, it’s true. We only get to where we are by living through what we do, and making choices we believe at the time are right. And their rightness extends to an existential level, as they are the chips of the chisel that shape us into the people we are meant to become.

My own walkabout took me to a town Strayed also knows: Ashland, Oregon. In addition to being overtly quirky and magical, Ashland plays temporary host to many PCT thru-hikers, whom you’ll often see at the post office, retrieving their resupply boxes (the value of which can’t be underestimated).  I stayed in the same room Strayed did at the Ashland Hostel, and encountered plenty of thru-hikers, who dazzled me with their filthy roguishness and earthy charm. One morning I overheard a phone conversation between a skirt-clad hiker and her parent, and as she begged for another month’s subsidy to finish the trek. And when she hung up, after fighting for this like a mother bear defending her cubs, I apprehended her completely differently: I knew what a significant, all-encompassing journey she was enveloped in. How we both were undertaking a quest away from civilization that would shift our paradigms for the rest of our lives.

Though my own trip was not as strenuous as that of a PCT hiker, after it my life did indeed change, and I found some of the strength and context and meaning I’d been craving. Like Strayed, I understood how to ride out the many obstacles that come when traveling and camping. And how enduring them and finding solutions and making it to the other side gets you very familiar with how strong and tenacious a mofo you can be. When you’re left early without a mother, these are facts that it takes time to learn--and taking care of yourself goes from being a great mystery to a necessity to a point of pride.

Strayed is at her best when she shows us not only this painful part of her life, but the path that brought her insight into and transcendence over it.

**********

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Alfred A. Knopf; 315 pages; $25.95)

For a followup on this piece, about the 2012 thru-hiking season in OR and the influence of this book, please see my 7/13 entry.

The Truest Short Film Ever Made: Henri, Paw de Deux

Will Braden (aka Henri) has indeed encapsulated life's many truths. I fear I'm now too exhausted to issue further comment... 

Daniel Suelo - The Man Who Quit Money

 A Review

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. 

We were in a really bad way before the white man came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”

-- Lakota sage Lame Deer (from John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions)

If you’re searching for a modern-day successor to Thoreau, Daniel Suelo could be your postmodern Transcendentalist. Known by author Mark Sundeen as “The Man Who Quit Money,” Suelo has spent the last 12 years living in a cave near Moab, Utah, foraging for food, working occasionally (but not for wages), reflecting deeply on life’s Big Questions, and somehow managing to keep himself off the hamster wheel of getting and spending. Suelo is the rare person who has actually been able to opt out of life’s pecuniary tangle, while still living an existence that appears full and unclouded by the desperation and despair that we tend to associate with homelessness.

He notes, “I’m employed by the universe. Since everywhere I go is the universe, I am always secure. Life has flourished for billions of years like this. I never knew such security before I gave up money. Wealth is what we are dependent upon for security. My wealth never leaves me. Do you think Bill Gates is more secure than I?”

50-year-old Suelo began life as Daniel Shellabarger, the fifth child of a pair of thoughtful evangelical Christians who was raised to take the Bible literally, and yet also, somehow, was permitted to question. A thread of the book traces his theological development, from a child forced to believe, to a deeply inquisitive college student, to someone who reads source texts from world religions, as well as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Tolstoy, and cobbles together a personal theology that reflects his own beliefs. In later years, Suelo even goes back and reviews texts that inspired his parents, such as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and comes to understand Jesus’ more revolutionary aspects. He also conceives his own theological schema, such as the concept of “divine Chance,” which he develops as a penniless visitor to Alaska, who must test the phrase “God will provide.” He realizes that to experience true faith, he must accept that there’s nothing in the material world to fall back on.

Starting at age 26, Suelo spends several years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. During that time, some of his religious convictions are tested, as when he visits the mansion of a fellow volunteer who has recruited Ecuadorian natives into helping him run his own cattle business, to the point at which they are “civilized” into being the richest Indians in the jungle. He notes, “There was no poverty in the jungle until they introduced money, and all the sudden there’s poverty. And all the diseases that come with it. And you look at people and they’re not happy. They have all these goods, and they’re unhappy.”

Suelo. Photo: Benjamin Lesage.

While battling his own demons (depression, sexuality), Suelo retains his sense of philosophical inquiry, as he spends more than a decade trying to make the switch to a life without money. Sundeen well-conveys how conscious and reflective Suelo is, as he takes great care to unravel the roots of so much suffering derived of our participation in a monetary system. Ironically Suelo emerges as deeply Christian, in the sense of living out what Christ actually taught: becoming spiritually enlightened through giving to the poor and living humbly. As Suelo asserts, “All this work, work, work and obligation we think is so righteous is really evil, destructive. The more I read the Sermon on the Mount, the more I see it is instructions for releasing ourselves from the Money System—the System of Debt & Obligation.”

Because he lives in a cave and thinks deeply, one might conclude that Suelo is a hermit. But this is actually not the case, as it wasn’t for Thoreau. Despite his comfort with alone time, Suelo is “a social butterfly” and enjoys the companionship of his many friends and family members. In fact, his vow to live without money often draws to him people who are curious about his life and principles. He readily acknowledges that, in a completely interconnected universe, no one is entirely self-sufficient—and his renunciation of money is not about attempting to break those ties.

I edited Sundeen’s work when I was an editor at Outside Magazine years ago. However, I don’t know him personally and have no investment in the book’s success, so can rave about it at will. Obviously, the writing quality is high, but what makes this volume so compelling is the number of questions it raises about the issues we all grapple with: money and greed, family, relationship, compensations of every stripe, trading quality of life for work, the definition of home, etc. Sundeen hews a direct path into Suelo’s mind, and it’s fascinating to watch him take clear-eyed looks at his own life and motivations. At one point, Suelo discusses why he’s not in a relationship, and Sundeen goes straight for it, asking, “How much of your life is just a reaction to not falling in love. Do you think you were driven into solitude by a broken heart?” Suelo’s measured response reveals just how deeply he has considered these questions—and his reflection compels the reader’s own soul-searching as well.

McCandless

Of course many parallels between the journeys of Suelo and Chris McCandless (subject of Into the Wild) exist. McCandless would have definitely agreed with Suelo that “the way of truth is the way of nonpossession,” as he donated his entire $25K savings to Oxfam before embarking on his cross-country adventure. Both young men realized that their experiences could be diminished by having money to fall back on if the going got tough. And both realized that money often prevents us from enjoying our lives in the deepest possible ways.

Unsurprisingly, there is no tradition of living without cash in the US. Most likely because money was so fetishized by our ancestors. Native American writer Vine Deloria (God is Red) notes, “In the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, poverty was considered indicative of sloth and other sins, and it was seen as proof of the individual’s degeneracy…As the white populace of Christian America has become more affluent, the concept of stewardship has been developed to explain the embarrassingly rapid growth of wealth of a substantial number of peoples. The theory goes that we are not really greedy, God has simply blessed us by giving us wealth over which we are to exercise good stewardship.”

This book's release has been particularly well timed, for an era in which we're realizing what "good stewardship" for a few has meant to the many, some of whom find themselves in Suelo's situation involuntarily and are forced to confront the very same questions he has addressed so eloquently. Suelo's philosophical journey should inspire all of us to wonder about the financial system we were born into and the alternatives that might just offer a happier existence to far more than the 1 percent.

###

Suelo produces a blog, “Moneyless World – Free World – Priceless World,” at http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/ and a website with a lot of great answers to FAQs, “Living Without Money,” http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/. (Nope, no wi-fi in the cave; online life happens at the library.)

More about Chris McCandless: http://www.christophermccandless.info/.

Check it out! This review can also be read at the NY Journal of Books:
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/man-who-quit-money