Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels - Softcover

Hochschild, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815605943 ISBN 13: 9780815605942

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1999

Synopsis

For some 30 years, Adam Hochschild's voice has been one of the most distinctive 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: A Memoir of Father and Son will find in these articles the same warm autobiographical voice that made that book so memorable: He revisits his time as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, as a New England prep school student, and as a teenager seeing apartheid firsthand in South Africa. But readers will find much more as well: profiles of an adoptive Gypsy and of a governor general's son turned revolutionary, essays about Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy, a journey to one of the most remote corners of the Amazon rain forest, and a remarkable evocation of two of Hochschild's personal heroes―who, in hillside trenches at the height of the Russian Civil War, faced each other across a battlefield.

About this title

Book Description:

Winner of the 1997 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay

From the Back Cover:

"This remarkable memoir in one voice, Adam Hochschild's, reflects a chorus of voices--of outsiders who sprang from the privileged inside: in the twilights of apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union, in the tempest of Amazonian America, and in the turmoil of literary precincts. It is a rich and rewarding adventure in the reading." --Studs Terkel

"For anyone wishing to revisit the late twentieth century, Adam Hochschild is the ideal traveling companion. Wherever he takes you--to a combat zone in El Salvador, an anti-apartheid rally in South Africa, the claustrophobic apartments of Moscow--you will find the place lit up with gentle humor and a luminous moral intelligence. In a time of much glibness and sensationalism, Hochschild is the rare journalist who qualifies as a gentleman, a scholar, and a mensch." --Barbara Ehrenreich

"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 offers something rare. Hochschild is one of those unusual serious writers who can write about whatever interests him with intelligence, honesty and style." --Orville Schell, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley

"From the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties, from Mississippi to Moscow, Adam Hochschild has been on the front lines (and behind the scenes), bringing back vividly detailed stories that he tells with the skill of a raconteur, the sincerity of a personal essayist, and the conscience of a latter-day Orwell. I heartily recommend Hochschild as a guide to finding the trapdoor in a world of ticky places." --Carl H. Klaus, founder, Program in Non-Fiction, University of Iowa

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0815605943
• ISBN 13: 9780815605942
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304