Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels

by Adam Hochschild

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815605942
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1999
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. After graduating from college, he worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, and as an editor and writer at Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was a cofounder of Mother Jones magazine and was an editor there until 1981. He is the author The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, The Mirror at Midnight A South African Journey, and Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son. His articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Mother Jones, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

October 5, 1942

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

A.B., Harvard College, 1963

Read an Excerpt

Unlike other mammals, writers are not born into the world knowing how to make their own particular noise. Almost from the beginning, wolves howl, hogs grunt, bears growl. They need no MFA programs in growling, or summer workshops in discovering the grunt within. Even if separated from their families at birth and raised by some other species, they still know the right sound. But writers are different: all too easily they mistake someone else's sound for their own. For many years, that's what happened with me.

What People are Saying About This

Carl H. Klaus

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)

Studs Terkel

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Orville Schell

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)

Editorial Reviews

In an impressive broadloom of subjects, Hochschild (Half the Way Home) offers 21 of his magazine-length reports on the world. Writer for Ramparts, co-founder of Mother Jones, he follows a passion for people likewise aflame for the detoured way of life for an intense political or a social justice. His wonderful lead profile of Jan Yoors, a Gypsy in New York, typifies Hochschild's affinity for the intriguing oblique. He writes trenchantly on Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry and Walter R. Brooks who wrote about Freddy the Pig for children. Of his uncle Boris Vasilievich Sergievski, captain in the Imperial Russian Air Force and later test pilot for Pam Am, he writes, "He was a Tom Jones parachuted by accident into a Henry James novel." In "From Hitler to Human Rights," his depiction of Goebbels-like Floyd Cochran of the racist Aryan Nation becomes a stunning portrayal of the power of the human spirit for a sea change in values. He's no less incisive when the subject is a place. Clearly fascinated by the world beyond himself, Hochschild extracts the essences of Russia, El Salvador, South Africa, Senegal, Colombia and Mississippi 30 years after Freedom Summer. The single deep immersion into his own background ("World on a Hilltop"), about his four girl-less, money-heavy prep-school years at Pomfret in Connecticut, leads him to realize "how bizarre and unjust is the entire world of prep schools." Abruptly he confesses his addiction to reading battle books, defending himself with "no study has shown that we lovers of war books are more likely to go out and start wars." Despite the mandatory chapter on John F. Kennedy and "Camelotry," readers will find this wide-ranging, well-crafted collection an enthralling excursion around the world and into the heart. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A collection of magazine articles and time-bound reportage by the estimable Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, 1994, etc.), cofounder of Mother Jones magazine.

Hochschild is a thoughtful, discerning reporter and a solid writer, but some of this material may seem a little stale, like picking up a decade-old newsmagazine and reading about life in the Soviet Union. Still, he's quite good in pieces such as "Aristocratic Revolutionary," a 1985 profile of Patrick Duncan, a white South African who was editor of an anti-apartheid paper in the early 1960s. One of his best pieces is a 1978 profile of Jan Yoors, a Belgian youth who ran away with the gypsies in 1934; Hochschild found the renowned author of The Gypsies and Crossing residing near Washington Square, a double amputee who made his living designing and weaving tapestries. Another visit finds the author in the French Alps with novelist and art critic John Berger, whom he liked "because he was the first writer I've run across who could explain why so much fine art is boring." Hochschild traveled extensively for these pieces: Mississippi, the Soviet Union, Senegal, El Salvador, South Africa, the Amazon. One 1995 article finds him in Colombia to witness the Indians' "startling migration in reverse": They were leaving the towns and missions and "rebuilding their traditional dwellings deep in the forest." A few literary essays are included, most notably a penetrating search for the young, sensitive Hemingway who existed before the myth, the "Papa" persona, the compulsive braggart, took over. And charmingly, this redoubtable peacenik of the '60s and '70s confesses to a lifelong addiction to war novels and books about combat.

These pieces speak clearly to the times in which they were written, but not to the ages.

Kirkus Reviews