Authors: Philip Weiss
ISBN-13: 9780060096878, ISBN-10: 006009687X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: June 2005
Edition: Reprint
Philip Weiss has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor to Esquire, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Observer. He lives in upstate New York.
In 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut.
Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga.
Now journalist Philip Weiss "shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel" (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.
American Taboo is the story of how he got away with murder and walks free in New York to this day. To tell it, Philip Weiss has conducted a remarkably tenacious investigation, and has tracked down most of Deb Gardner's colleagues, mining their letters home, their diaries, their unpublished novels and poems. What he reconstructs is a fascinating diorama of life in the Peace Corps in the 1970's, on the edge of the world, four flights and 7,000 miles from home.
1 | A Legend of the South Seas | 1 |
2 | Tonga 16 | 8 |
3 | Swearing In | 16 |
4 | The Tonga Club | 29 |
5 | Steilacoom | 43 |
6 | The Perfect Volunteer | 48 |
7 | Stranded | 61 |
8 | The Dance at the Dateline | 72 |
9 | Prayers in the Bedford Truck | 81 |
10 | The Search | 92 |
11 | Tapu | 102 |
12 | "Help Me Tell the Untold Story of the Murder of Deborah Gardner" | 110 |
13 | Next of Kin | 113 |
14 | The Sendoff | 126 |
15 | A Vision in the Cathedral | 137 |
16 | Funerals | 150 |
17 | The Jail | 163 |
18 | Extraterritoriality | 178 |
19 | "A Flick of the Tip" | 189 |
20 | Once Out, All Out | 200 |
21 | Wayne's Appeal | 209 |
22 | At Sea | 215 |
23 | Tonga in the Dock | 232 |
24 | Tevolo | 246 |
25 | The Verdict | 257 |
26 | Privy Council | 273 |
27 | Never-Never Land | 285 |
28 | The Earthquake | 299 |
29 | American Taboo | 308 |
30 | Condolence Calls | 316 |
31 | The End of the Legend | 322 |
32 | Behind the Bricks | 330 |
33 | Getting Away with It | 340 |
A Note on Sources | 349 | |
Acknowledgments | 363 |