Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Roman Dial raises his son to be an adventurer. Unlike his father, Cody tends to be a soloist. After walking the dangerous Petén in Guatemala, he continues on to Costa Rica where he enters the Corcovado National Park illegally to travel off the official trails, w/o a guide in contravention to park rules. The rules are there for a reason, as the park is also inhabited by illegal gold miners (who turn out to be one of the most sympathetic set of people in this story) and is a drug transit route. When his father realizes Cody's overdue, Mr. Dial rushes down to Costa Rica to see if he can find him. As this part of the story went on (and on), I grew increasingly less sympathetic to Mr. Dial. People who help him are treated with passing generosity, people who won't drop everything and mobilize the resources he wants are characterized as arrogant and heartless. He particularly dislikes the man heading up the Red Cross team, but given how Mr. Dial was behaving, I'm sure the feeling was mutual. Over the course of two years he tries everything. He leverages his various relationships to try and get a US National Guard rescue team to CR, he gets in touch with Gen John Kelly, Commander of the fricking US Southern Command at the time and is miffed that the Obama adminstration won't do more. This is the part of the book where he really lost me. His son was an adult, he chose to do not only a risky hike but also a dangerous one, but Mr. Dial's expectation is that the full force of the Costa Rican government and then the US government should be mobilized to find him. I don't think so. Then to keep pressure on the Costa Rican government, he agrees to participate in a documentary/reality series that films the efforts of private investigators - one is an ex-DEA agent, big, muscular, the type who 'takes names and kicks ass'. That turns into a debacle. Mr. Dial is obviously driven by a deep love for his son, but also by a deep sense of guilt that (I think) he's trying to work through in this book. As an elegy to a great kid and a deep father-son bond, there is some beauty in the book and I hope it brings him some comfort. For the rest, its a portrait of a father mad with grief who behaves like an ugly American, when a less self-absorbed, entitled approach might have gotten him further faster.