Finding the Trapdoor

by Hochschild, Adam

• ISBN13: 9780815604471
• ISBN10: 0815604475
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-05-01
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

"Whether you are a general reader looking to be transported to other times and places or a student trying to unlock the mysteries of how good non-fiction is written, (Finding the Trapdoor) is something rare". -- Orville Schell, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley For some thirty years, Adam Hochschild has been one of the most distinctive voices in American journalism. With grace and wit, he has brought to a startling variety of subjects a combination of adventurous reporting and personal honesty. Hochschild's readers can count on an unobtrusive erudition, a sense of justice, and an irrepressible curiosity about life. Admirers of Hochschild's Half the Way Home will find in these articles the same warm autobiographical voice that made that book so memorable. Hochschild revisits a time when he was a civil rights worker in Mississippi and as a teenager seeing apartheid firsthand in South Africa. But readers will find much more as well: Profiles of an adoptive gypsy, essays about Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy, and a journey to one of the remotest corners of the Amazon rain forest. This collection gathers the best of his shorter pieces over the years, all of which first appeared in a variety of publications, including The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and the New York Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
Introduction	xi
Prologue Finding the Trapdoor	3	(12)
PART ONE Gypsies, Russians, and Other Heroes	15	(108)
A Gypsy for Our Time	15	(16)
Aristocratic Revolutionary	31	(19)
Broad Jumper in the Alps	50	(15)
Two Russians	65	(23)
From Hitler to Human Rights	88	(13)
Keep Up Pressure in All Directions	101	(22)
PART TWO To the Navel of the World and Other Journeys	123	(112)
World on a Hilltop	123	(17)
Summer of Violence	140	(11)
We Are Not in Switzerland	151	(17)
Isle of Flowers, House of Slaves	168	(7)
Empire's End: A Moscow Journal	175	(21)
The Grand Bargain in South Africa	196	(13)
Fishbooks and Chickens	209	(26)
PART THREE War and Other Literary Pleasures	235
Paragon of Porkers: Freddy the Pig	235	(6)
Magic Journalism	241	(10)
The Pleasures of War	251	(8)
Hemingway: Hunter and Victim	259	(6)
The Private Volcano of Malcolm Lowry	265	(9)
JFK: Ever-Changing Hero	274	(6)
Remembrance of Africas Past	280	(6)
Sex Books, Then and Now	286