Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir

A daughter's quest to understand her charismatic and troubled father, an immigrant who crosses borders both real and illusory--between sanity and madness, science and spirituality, life and death Winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize - "Expressive and affecting . . . deeply researched and tightly written . . . Crux, at its heart, is [Jean] Guerrero's love letter to her dad."--NPR Throughout Jean Guerrero's childhood, her father, Marco Antonio, was an erratic and elusive presence. A self-taught genius at fixing, creating, and conjuring things--and capable of transforming himself into a shaman, dreamcaster, or animal whisperer in his enchanted daughter's eyes--he gradually began to lose himself in his peculiar obsessions, careening wildly between reality and hallucination. In time, he fled his family and responsibilities--to Asia, Europe, and eventually back to Mexico. He succumbed to drug- and alcohol-fueled manias, while suffering the effects of what he said were CIA mind-co