REVIEWS
Thirty Below
by Harry Groome ’55
The Connelly Press,
224 pages, $12.99
Reviewed by Arielle
Greenleaf Driscoll ’99
Harry Groome’s novel,
Thirty Below
, tells
the tale of Carrie Ritter, a twenty-some-
thing whose quest for love has left her
vulnerable and lost. We meet Carrie in
her La Jolla apartment as she admires
her own body in the mirror and ponders
her future with a yet-unseen Internet
admirer, Bart McFee, who plans to whisk
her away to Alaska for the winter.
Carrie’s thoughts are quickly inter-
rupted by her violent ex-boyfriend, Jake
Hornbeck, who assaults her as revenge
for their breakup and proclaims, “I’ll get
even if it’s the last thing I do.”
Despite warnings from her friend and
roommate, Carrie decides to join Bart to
winter at his cabin in the foothills of the
Wrangell Mountains in Alaska, fleeing
her stagnant life in La Jolla.
In a parallel chapter, Groome beauti-
fully introduces us to Daredevil, an
Alaskan wolf whose leg is caught in a
hunter’s trap. Freed by a young Indian
boy, Daredevil cautiously proceeds back
into the wild, careful not to encounter
any traps along the way. While Groome
artfully introduces the story of Dare-
devil, the apparent parallel between
Carrie and Daredevil falls short through-
out the rest of the story, leaving the
chapter a bit of an outlier.
Through his vivid depiction of life in
the wilderness, it is evident that Groome
has expert experience living amidst the
animals. According to his biography,
the author “spends every night he can
sleeping in a lean-to in the Adirondack
Mountains.” From the keen sense of the
raven to the fierce yet protective nature
of the wolf, Groome captures the wild
with precision.
In the end, Carrie Ritter, who continues
to be haunted by her past even thousands
of miles away from La Jolla, gains the tools
of survival through the help of McFee and
a strong Indian woman named Feather, but
not without tragedy and miracles along
the way.
The Ideal Man: The
Tragedy of Jim
Thompson and the
American Way of War
by Joshua Kurlantzick
Wiley, 272 pages, $25.95
Reviewed by Richard Schade ’62
The dust jacket for
The Ideal Man
bears a
photograph of James H. W. “Jim” Thomp-
son ’24. From the pleasantly intense face
and the casual elegance of his shirt down
to khaki trousers, Thompson exhibits man-
nered elegance. The patterned silk cloth
draped across one knee defines him as
the Silk King he had become.
With his privileged Delaware lineage,
it was natural that Thompson came to
be schooled at St. Paul’s and Princeton.
Later, employment at a New York archi-
tectural firm assured him respectable
credentials, yet, as war loomed, he felt
duty-bound to serve – initially in the
National Guard, defending “Delaware
from German battleships.” He was even-
tually recruited by the OSS (predecessor
of the CIA), where he felt at home since
“the men around him had prepped at
St. Paul’s and Andover.” Active duty in
Europe and beyond in the clandestine
service garnered him five Bronze Stars.
Kurlantzick tells the story well, focus-
ing on the post-war years when Thomp-
son – now a CIA operative – was posted
to Bangkok. The readable, academically
documented narrative contextualizes
Thompson’s exploits and intellect vis-
à
-vis the tumultuous intricacies of Thai
politics and social history caught up in
the American way of war in Southeast
Asia. Thailand became increasingly key in
the post-colonial era, one defined by the
notion of the Domino Theory. Thompson
was always in the mix, but more as an
intellectually honest dissenter who viewed
the U.S. buildup as blatantly imperialist,
with his preference for allowing fledgling
nations such as Vietnam to seek self-
determination. As Thailand became pro-
gressively more Americanized, Thomp-
son’s views were out of step with both
overlords and Thais.
Thompson’s sympathies were with the
preservation of Thailand’s culture. He
collected Buddhist art and displayed the
treasures in his residence, one construct-
ed of teak stilt houses. The abode became
the center of Bangkok’s exclusive social
set, almost as if the museum-like rooms
were an implicit bulwark against the rav-
ages of Americanization. But as great a
Romantic as he was, Thompson was also
a canny entrepreneur, singlehandedly
reviving Thai silk production in a manner
sensitive to traditional practices. He be-
came, thus, the fabled Silk King, an “ideal
man” rather than an “ugly American.”
Some have theorized that Thompson’s
silk trading was a front for CIA operations.
Be that as it may, by the 1960s he became
ever more the misunderstood outsider and
even an irritant to Thais – as if this Ameri-
can dare comprehend
their
culture! As
a result, he became ill, overworked, and
despondent, but he kept up appearances
until his mysterious disappearance in 1967.
Over Easter of that year, he repaired to
the cool highlands of Malaysia with friends.
The last photograph of him shows him on
a picnic. One day he took a walk into the
highlands and was never seen again. The
swirl of conspiracy theories is well detailed
in the book, but ultimately it is the un-
solved mystery of his death that has assured
the life of this SPS graduate a legendary
status to this very day.
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