



The Runner
A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The Runner tells the remarkable true story of a teenage drifter and petty thief named James Hogue who woke up one cold winter morning in a storage shed in Utah and decided to start his life anew. Re-imagining himself as a self-educated ranch hand named Alexi Indris-Santana who read Plato under the stars and could run a mile in under four minutes, Hogue applied and was accepted to Princeton University, where he excelled academically, made the track team, and became a member of the elite Ivy Club.
Echoing both The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of Hogue’s life before and after he went to Princeton is both an immensely affecting portrait of a dreamer and a striking indictment of the Ivy League “meritocracy” to which Hogue wanted so badly to belong. Drawing elegant parallels between Hogue’s ambitions and the American myth of self-invention, while also examining his own uneasy identification with his troubled subject, David Samuels has fashioned a powerful metaphor for the corruptions of the American dream, revealing exceptional gifts as a reporter and literary stylist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this extended riff on Samuels's New Yorker article of the same name, the author pursues James Hogue, portrayed as a cunning, intelligent drifter who at age 28, in 1988, created a new identity for himself as Alexi Santana, a 16-year-old cowboy, who became the Princeton University admissions committee's darling. Santana's Princeton matriculation was delayed because, unbeknownst to school authorities, Hogue was doing time for bicycle theft. One year later, Santana, a talented runner, entered the school without a hitch until a track meet spectator outed the impostor during his sophomore year. Though Samuels has a gift for contextualizing people and events, he misses his mark in this repetitive and fragmented profile. He is so taken by his elusive subject, whom he calls "a convicted fabulist," that he lets Hogue, a compulsive liar and criminal with repeated offenses, off the hook far too easily. To Samuels, Hogue's behavior is as harmless as the youthful lies the author formerly told strangers on airplanes. But the lie and the con are not one and the same, and the reader winces as Hogue cons his way past Samuels's otherwise intelligent grasp.