Beta Reader Reviews

Background: A reader with an interest in military experiences, personal memoirs, and gritty real-life stories, particularly narratives about resilience, discipline, and survival.

I picked this up because of the title and the Marine in the author bio. The voice is the best thing about it. It’s plainspoken and self-deprecating, and the recurring line “I may be dumb, but I’m not as dumb as paper” made me grin. The Lurch fight in Chapter Six is a great set piece. He plans the solar plexus and uppercut, then loses it and charges while yelling “the way I had been taught in the Marine Corps.” After the adrenaline crash, the deputy says, “It’s hard to arrest a fellow for fighting when there’s only one of you.” The childhood machete chapter also hit me hard.

My complaint is that the Marine Corps barely shows up. NBC school, qualifying “in the high two-thirties,” Okinawa martial arts and El Toro are scattered through a few paragraphs. The title phrase appears once, when he says he “felt like an American badass in my own mind.” The book is really about surviving homelessness and chasing a castor bean mystery. I wanted boot camp, Okinawa and a Marine’s eye on the streets. I also lost patience when the ricin theory grew into zombie plans and a rabies outbreak.

Background: A reader focused on nonfiction writing, evidence-based storytelling, factual accuracy, and the distinction between personal experiences and broader claims.

The book’s central claim is that for fifty years someone, possibly the Sheriff’s Department with “Latin Nationals” as contractors, has been secretly harvesting castor plants for ricin. The evidence is plants disappearing at night, one threat from a deputy in 1994, and a feeling of being followed. The author is often honest about this (“I have no proof,” “I probably am wrong”). But Chapter Eleven says “Nothing I am writing here is true.” That is almost certainly meant as “can’t be proven,” and as written it will be quoted against him.

The theory also never tests the boring explanations. Public Works cleared a lot, a contractor cleared an encampment, and castor is a common weed. Then it escalates to bees carrying ricin pollen, CONPLAN 8888, and a rabies “zombie” scenario, which costs credibility.

I’d flag three things before publication:

• Legal: The accusations of evidence tampering and perjury against deputies need a media-law review.
• Profiling: “Latin Nationals” appears about eleven times as the people following him, with no basis beyond his perception.
• Safety: The hypothetical of a ricin attack on locked-down schools in Chapter Fifteen should be cut.

The statistics (600,000 pounds seized, 58 prescriptions per 100 people, 46 deaths a day) also need citations. The most credible material is how police, hospitals and clinics treated a homeless veteran. In Riverside, the deputy’s attitude changes the moment he asks, “Are you homeless?” That is the real story.

Background: A reader with an interest in homelessness, social challenges, human resilience, and the personal experiences of individuals navigating life on the streets.

I’ve worked with unhoused clients for twenty years, and this is full of details you can’t invent. There’s the “Cereal Killer / Got Milk?” sign, the pallet A-frame under a blue tarp, and the Sterno “hot box” that gave him a third-degree burn. There are $5 “tents for rent” on Skid Row, the “Not for Resale” Bombas socks, and the fake “Rape!” scream to lure him from his camp. His honesty about his own scams adds credibility.

The warmest moments are the quiet ones. A stranger hands him $100 on Christmas Day, a family buys him pizza, and he concludes “Not everyone hates the homeless.” He talks a dying heroin user into getting off the street, and later watches Eddy push his disabled sister’s wheelchair. The emotional core is his mother’s death at twelve, with her gifts still under the tree, and then the beer at her funeral.

As a clinician, I want to say gently that the premonitions, the constant following, and the “FBI van” on his Wi-Fi list are the parts a reader may question. He often separates what he saw from what he concluded, and more of that would help. The weakest section is how he got out: hip surgery, conservatorship, his sister’s house. It gets a few pages. I’d recommend a sensitivity read for “Latin Nationals,” “cholos” and the slur in Uncle Ruben’s backstory, plus a content note (overdose, suicide-watch episode, violence).

Background: A reader focused on narrative structure, pacing, writing style, character development, and the overall reading experience of a memoir.

The prose is conversational and punchy, with short lines that keep pages turning. The strongest chapters are Three (waking from the coma), Six (Lurch) and Nine (the machete). But the book opens with a lecture on Prohibition, Nixon and the drug war, and that’s the least inviting way to meet this author. Open with the coma scene or the machete.

The back half drifts into opinion: drug education, plea bargains, polygraphs for cops, defunding the police, gun control, and the FDA and oxycodone. The drug-education proposal appears in Chapters Eleven, Sixteen and Seventeen, and the polygraph idea in Two and Fourteen. The ending is flat. It closes on opioids and “let them tell the truth,” not on the man.

Some tics need trimming. I counted “I believe” about 78 times, “Look,” opening 17 paragraphs, and “dumb as a bag of [hammers/nails/doorknobs]” five times. “Like telling your wife about your girlfriend” appears twice. The timeline is also hard to follow (2015 start, “four years” on the streets, “2016 to 2019” in the fields, “seven years” sober), so a simple timeline up front would help. The 16 photos add authenticity, but the captions should be consistent.