[.ca] Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in ... (ISBN 0060959223)

From Amazon.com:
"The man of knowledge," Nietzsche is said to have remarked, "must not only be able to love his enemies; he must also be able to hate his friends." Indeed, it's a thirst for existential knowledge and adventure that unexpectedly pushes two bosom friends beyond the brink of disaster--and ultimately calls into question the very meaning of friendship--in Journal of the Dead. Jacob Kersten's riveting account—expanding on an article originally published in Maxim--reconstructs the true-crime story of a baffling murder that took place one desperate morning in 1999 in New Mexico's Rattlesnake Canyon. Raffi Kodikian and David Coughlin, having lost their way after embarking on a casual, short-term hike in the desert, find themselves out of hope, on the verge of fatal dehydration. According to a journal kept by Kodikian, they decide on a mutual suicide pact to spare each other excruciating pain before an inevitable death. Yet Kodikian survives after stabbing his friend. Soon afterward, he is rescued by rangers and subsequently charged with the murder of his best friend. Kersten's source material has a disturbingly fascinating quality from the start, but his accomplishment in shaping it into a multi-layered narrative is admirable and artful. Kersten pulls out all the stops in depicting not just the back story of these two friends and their circle but also the deeper focus of the history of the desert, its allure and attendant attractions--in particular the Carlsbad Caverns--along with intriguing excursions on such topics as the biology of dehydration, the mechanics of topographical maps, and the legal niceties of the "intoxication defense." His choice of background details enhances our sense of the extreme situation in which these unfortunate individuals are trapped and helps retard our easy judgment of Kodikian's choice. Kersten is especially good at restoring an element of suspense--the outcome of the desert tragedy is replayed earlier in his book--in the way he allows the ensuing courtroom drama to unfold. Yet however much he attempts to maintain an aura of ambiguity around Kodikian's motives, Kersten can't quite efface a stance of exculpatory compassion. --Thomas May

scary and confusing:
I picked this book up having heard vaguely about the case. It is a well written book. It is hard to comprehend how the "crime" occured and the author does a good job in detailing the circumstances and the evidence. what comes across most strongly is that the parents of the victim forgave his killer and as a result the conviction and sentence which would other wise have seemed a travesty of justice, comes across as a fair conclusion. don't read this book if you want all the answers -no one has those but as a story it is very very compelling reading

This work is unreasearched and spurious:
Kersten is an author who would be better off sticking with writing little articles for his immature men's magazine. Living in New York (I was surprised he'd even been to New Mexico for his reasearch) Kersten could not have been less qualified to write this story nor have given a more innaccurate portrayal of South East N.M. I am a resident of N.M. living no less than one hour away from the area concerned in the book, and I myself have visited many of the canyonlands around this area for much of my life; contrary to what the author makes it seem the Chihuahuan desert is not a virtual gehenna with danger lurking everywhere, the yucca plant cannot tear through denim like it is "paper mache" despite what Kersten's extensive desert experience would tell you; tumbleweeds(a trade mark of the West) which the author refers to being present here in the 16th cent. in one of his multiple, partially accurate historical anecdotes, are a variety of Russian thistle, not brought to the U.S. until much later. Also contrary to one of Kersten's ridiculous stereotypical references, most people in N.M. DO NOT carry firearms in their vehicles. These are just a few of the many spurious accusations made by the author. I think Kersten should take a few history lessons, research what he attempts to assert, and learn better grammar before he tries to write another book.

Intriguing:
I read a two sentence blurb about this work of nonfiction and immediately had to read it. Two young friends on a camping trip and one of them winds up dead of a supposed mercy killing by the other. The book does not disappoint. It recounts the tale honestly and fairly of the two men whose overnight camping trip in the Southwest went horribly wrong--and the aftermath that followed. Jason Kersten writes well. The book reads like a compelling magazine article--but the story clearly merits a full-sized book. Kersten stays focussed on the story and thankfully does not take any tangents to fill page space. Enjoy.

Highly recommended:
I thought that this book was excellent and, as they say, could not put it down. I thought that it was very well written AND researched and that the author was meticulously fair, giving plenty of ammunition to both those who feel that Kodikian is a stone-cold killer and those who believe that there were extreme mitigating circumstances. As for those who criticized the author for not interviewing Kodikian, I found that criticism silly--if the guy is not going to give an interview, what can you do? I'm sure he tried. I did find some sloppiness in the editing. Take for example, the issue of dates. At various times, we are told that the killing occurred on Sunday, August 8. However, page 113 tells us that Friday was August 4 and Saturday was August 5. This of course impossible if Sunday was the 8th. Then, on page 197, we are given a third possibility (albeit through a witness) that Thursday was August 6. Obviously 2 of these 3 scenarios are wrong. How did the editors miss this? Finally, I have always been somewhat puzzled about the concept of a "suspended sentence". It sounds me me like a completely meaningless concept because the sentence always seems "suspended" into perpituity and is never actually served. So what is the point of a suspended sentence at all? Why not just give the actual sentence?

Haunting:
I think a lot of us are fascinated with tales of treks across the desert, about what the desert can do to the unwary and unprepared. We can see those vultures circling and we can feel the chapped lips, the mouth so dry that we can hardly speak, and we can see the shimmer of the heat on the dry rocks and sand and hear the wind whispering, and we can be enveloped by the silence. In this true crime tale Maxim magazine senior editor Jason Kersten expands on an article he wrote for that magazine and turns it into a modest book. It is a engrossing story about two young men, close friends, who travel west and get lost in Rattlesnake Canyon in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park without any water. As dehydration, fatigue, and hopelessness set in, the two men prepare to die. One of them, David Coughlin, is vomiting violently, hour after hour. He is in such pain that, so the story goes, he asks his friend Raffi Kodikian to kill him, to put him out of his misery. Some hours later the next day their camp is spotted and the rangers come. They find Kodikian alive in the tent. He tells them where Coughlin's body is and confesses that he stabbed him through the heart as an act of mercy. What makes this story work, and what makes it worth an entire book, is the uncertainty that still exists about Raffi Kodikian: did he kill his friend, as he claims, because he could not bare to see him suffer anymore, or did he have a more sinister motive? Kersten's narrative clearly leans toward the idea that Kodikian's action was a delusional mercy killing; however most of the law enforcement people mentioned in the book find Kodikian's story unconvincing. Kersten himself allows that in all the literature he could find, there was only one story of a mercy killing in the desert. Apparently it is an extremely rare event. Furthermore, the Rattlesnake Canyon they couldn't find their way out of is not that big. As Kersten terms it, Rattlesnake Canyon "is just a crack--five miles long, seven hundred feet deep..." Another factor that makes this story interesting is the law itself and the defense chosen by famed New Mexico lawyer Gary Mitchell and his assistant Shawn Boyne. Since New Mexican law defines a mercy killing as a murder, period, and is not a complete defense to the crime, the lawyers had to come up with something better. Boyne made an argument for "involuntary intoxication" and it seemed to fit. Only problem was, according to the legal definition of that defense an agent of intoxication was required. Instead what they had was lack of water. Curiously, they might have argued that the juice of the prickly pear cactus fruit was the agent, but for some reason they did not. Kersten reports that eating prickly pear cactus fruit was probably part of the reason Coughlin vomited so violently. Finally I have to say that Kersten does an excellent job with limited resources. He was not able to interview Kodikian, who refused his entreaties, so he had to reconstruct the story from the trial transcript and from interviews with other people, none of whom, of course, was in the canyon with the two men. Kersten also does a fine job of placing the story within the historical context of the New Mexican desert and deserts everywhere while making it clear how people die of thirst and how the law works in cases like this. However, as I finished the book, I was left somewhat dissatisfied as other readers were, not so much because I found Kodikian's story unbelievable or even because I doubted it, but because I felt that I did not really know Kodikian. We can see that "he appears to be," as Kersten reports, "quite a well-adjusted young man" who "had good friends" and appeared to enjoy life. Kersten adds, "He could be me or fifty people I know." (p. x) In fact the only negative thing anybody said about Kodikian was that he could be stubborn. I wondered as I finished the book if a stubborn person may be more likely to believe in his own judgment against the laws of men and be more willing to do something forbidden than the average person. I wonder, but I don't think that fully explains it. I really believe that the desert can do crazy things to our minds, especially when we are tired and thirsty and the implacable terrain shimmers and dances into a confusing mosaic as we become more and more removed from conventional reality and from hope. At such times in such circumstances we may very well become confused about what is right and what is wrong. At least I think that is what happened to David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian.