Strange but True Crime

In 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega got lost on a family hike in the Arkansas wilderness. She was found after three days where she survived drinking river water. Now there’s a book about it. What does it take to be a book? Novelist and Bard College professor Benjamin Hale is Haley’s uncle, so he wrote an article about it in Harper’s. When an article is expanded into a book, you wonder how much extra filling you get in the reading. A lot of books should be articles, rather than the other way around. (A lot of articles should be Substack posts, a lot of posts should be tweets, and a lot of tweets shouldn’t exist at all.)