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America's Back Porch
Takes the reader on a rarely seen tour of the underbelly of our culture, recording the colorful and grotesque, from Jesus-worshipping rattlesnake handlers in the Appalachains, to cosmetic surgeons giving face-lifts to dogs in Hollywood.
- GenresTravel
Hardcover
First published May 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 28, 2007
Here's a mean-spirited book by an English journalist who presents for our entertainment America as Freak Show. Roll up, roll up, for only a few dollars see... the Modern Primitives! Women who bind their feet in order to wear 7 inch heels! Yes! Peer inside the mysterious Elohim City, created by crazed Christian cultists armed to the teeth! Visit Murray, Kentucky, home of a terrifying gang of teenage vampires! And so on. Jeffreys writes with a horrible air of superiority about nearly all of his freaks.
"Like many elderly southern gentlemen of his type, there's probably not a single human pleasure he rates as innocent, except maybe wearing sheets and burning crosses" (page 130). For Jeffreys, all the cliches are true. He sets up the easiest of targets in order to have great fun in kicking them around. I open the book at random (page 83) : "'The Lord is with us tonight,' Wayne says in a southern accent which bears about as much resemblance to Standard English as rural Hundustani." This book is inviting us to laugh heartily at the trailer park zoo on display. We should congratulate ourselves on how much more intelligent and attractive we are than these creeps and weirdos, says Jeffreys, and reading this book I imagine he does, frequently. Returning from another expedition to California or Alabama I can imagine him chortling about the latest great story he's bagged (maybe a bunch of goofballs who think they've been raped by aliens), one hand on his laptop and the other on his coke spoon. Oops ! I just lapsed into Jeffreystyle for a moment there - for example (page 135) "despite her husband's denials she hired a private investigator, one of those bottom-feeders who usually have one hand on a whiskey bottle and the other rooting around in someone's trashcan".
I did enjoy two chapters - one in which a psychologist has a very funny rant against Christmas ("Haven't you felt enraged by someone to the extent that you bought them a present?") and an account of the Burning Man Festival - here, just for a moment, Jeffreys seems to actually like the people he's with. But that's rare. Mostly I get the impression that after another encounter with a wacko from Waco he can't get back to the hotel fast enough. As an Englishman myself, I almost feel I have to apologise to Americans for this book.
"Like many elderly southern gentlemen of his type, there's probably not a single human pleasure he rates as innocent, except maybe wearing sheets and burning crosses" (page 130). For Jeffreys, all the cliches are true. He sets up the easiest of targets in order to have great fun in kicking them around. I open the book at random (page 83) : "'The Lord is with us tonight,' Wayne says in a southern accent which bears about as much resemblance to Standard English as rural Hundustani." This book is inviting us to laugh heartily at the trailer park zoo on display. We should congratulate ourselves on how much more intelligent and attractive we are than these creeps and weirdos, says Jeffreys, and reading this book I imagine he does, frequently. Returning from another expedition to California or Alabama I can imagine him chortling about the latest great story he's bagged (maybe a bunch of goofballs who think they've been raped by aliens), one hand on his laptop and the other on his coke spoon. Oops ! I just lapsed into Jeffreystyle for a moment there - for example (page 135) "despite her husband's denials she hired a private investigator, one of those bottom-feeders who usually have one hand on a whiskey bottle and the other rooting around in someone's trashcan".
I did enjoy two chapters - one in which a psychologist has a very funny rant against Christmas ("Haven't you felt enraged by someone to the extent that you bought them a present?") and an account of the Burning Man Festival - here, just for a moment, Jeffreys seems to actually like the people he's with. But that's rare. Mostly I get the impression that after another encounter with a wacko from Waco he can't get back to the hotel fast enough. As an Englishman myself, I almost feel I have to apologise to Americans for this book.
July 8, 2013
Meandering, condescending, cruel, and riddled with typos.
August 11, 2025
I read this book maybe twenty years ago and only recently rediscovered it on my shelves and, in response to the several po-faced reviewers on GR, who claimed the author was a snooty English journalist seeking freaks to make fun of, I had to take another look because my recollection of the book was entirely different. Upon rereading I didn't find the author to be a callous sophisticate making fun of the yokels but a rather sensitive and self-effacing observer. Mr. Jeffreys does take an interest in some odd and, to a UK reader like myself, bizarre people and events, but he is acutely conscious of their circumstances and dwells on the poverty, a result of the decline in economic opportunity of the 'American Dream', that are at the root of what he reports. It maybe this aspect that caused some American reviewers to find offence, no one likes to hear that the 'land of opportunity' is in fact a land of opportunity only for those who have the opportunities already.
Looking at the book today I have to admit that like a great deal of travel reportage it has been overtaken by events. Things that were novel in 1999 - the Burning Man festival, hiring hitmen to kill unwanted spouses, LA dog grooming parlours are still around as are bear wrestling (where a declawed bear and with filed down teeth is brought to some honky-tonk bar bar and wrestles with various dunk customers), and the Angola prison rodeo (where prisoners 'performed' various dangers tasks for paltry sums and the amusements of visitors) are still going strong. The 'Dead Serious Group' which offered $5,000 to anyone killing a criminal in the midst of committing a crime seems no longer to be operating and, I am happy to report, that Heather Tallebrief has still not been caught. It is still illegal to have sex outside of marriage in the state of Idaho but the active prosecution of teenagers who had sex in Emmett city seems no longer to be a priority of the local police. The real pity is that the most interesting stories such as Stella Kasza's attempt to sue the US government over over the environmental and health breeches at Area 51 which one would hope would have found resolution have not.
What is really interesting is that there is so much that the author reports, such as the rise of conspiracies and social media, which he didn't, or couldn't, see how important they would become. Other stories, such as the malaise and loss of direction and purpose in the CIA post the collapse of the Soviet Union, have been overtaken by events since 9/11 - though the real effectiveness of the CIA is just as problematic today. It just has a new raison d'etre but seeing how badly it handled its original brief against the Soviet Union that isn't much comfort.
Jeffreys book is, in my opinion, better than most books of this type, there is a great deal of foreshadowing here, such as the rise of the bail bond industry, though back in 1999 reality TV had yet to make heroes of its more grotesque practitioners. It is actually in dealing with the bail bondsmen, snake handlers and other 'freaks' that Jeffreys shows his greatest sympathies because he doesn't treat them like fools but people struggling against forces that have made a lie of all their hopes and dreams.
This is a book which twenty five years has made continuous google updates essential but sadly, reading it again, it is easy to see the roots of the USA's current situation has long, deep, complex and uneasy roots.
Looking at the book today I have to admit that like a great deal of travel reportage it has been overtaken by events. Things that were novel in 1999 - the Burning Man festival, hiring hitmen to kill unwanted spouses, LA dog grooming parlours are still around as are bear wrestling (where a declawed bear and with filed down teeth is brought to some honky-tonk bar bar and wrestles with various dunk customers), and the Angola prison rodeo (where prisoners 'performed' various dangers tasks for paltry sums and the amusements of visitors) are still going strong. The 'Dead Serious Group' which offered $5,000 to anyone killing a criminal in the midst of committing a crime seems no longer to be operating and, I am happy to report, that Heather Tallebrief has still not been caught. It is still illegal to have sex outside of marriage in the state of Idaho but the active prosecution of teenagers who had sex in Emmett city seems no longer to be a priority of the local police. The real pity is that the most interesting stories such as Stella Kasza's attempt to sue the US government over over the environmental and health breeches at Area 51 which one would hope would have found resolution have not.
What is really interesting is that there is so much that the author reports, such as the rise of conspiracies and social media, which he didn't, or couldn't, see how important they would become. Other stories, such as the malaise and loss of direction and purpose in the CIA post the collapse of the Soviet Union, have been overtaken by events since 9/11 - though the real effectiveness of the CIA is just as problematic today. It just has a new raison d'etre but seeing how badly it handled its original brief against the Soviet Union that isn't much comfort.
Jeffreys book is, in my opinion, better than most books of this type, there is a great deal of foreshadowing here, such as the rise of the bail bond industry, though back in 1999 reality TV had yet to make heroes of its more grotesque practitioners. It is actually in dealing with the bail bondsmen, snake handlers and other 'freaks' that Jeffreys shows his greatest sympathies because he doesn't treat them like fools but people struggling against forces that have made a lie of all their hopes and dreams.
This is a book which twenty five years has made continuous google updates essential but sadly, reading it again, it is easy to see the roots of the USA's current situation has long, deep, complex and uneasy roots.
April 1, 2012
For those of you who have a nagging feeling that America is sinking into a swamp of paranoia and madness, let journalist Daniel Jeffries confirm your fears by shining his flashlight on the delusional opossum scuttling over America's Back Porch: bloodthirsty teen vampires of Kentucky, drunken jail guards wrestling de-clawed bears in bars, Check-A-Mate sex decoys for suspicious spouses, rich folks forking over money to get cosmetic surgery done on their pets, and a group called Dead Serious that will pay you $5,000 for killing anyone who is in the act of committing a crime against you.
What saves America's Back Porch from being a simple laundry list of minds gone astray is Jeffries' sense of adventure as he roots around America's underbelly. He quotes Jack Kerouac's famous lines "The only people for me
are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time"--but by the end of the book one has to wonder whether these lines were quoted for irony. Kerouac went on the road looking for love and kicks and the heart of America; the closest Jeffries gets to love or romance is an ex-CIA remote viewer (a psychic agent) who lives in an abandoned missile silo and is obsessed with finding Heather Tallchief, a woman who committed a supposedly perfect crime. (She made off with $4.1 million from an armored-car heist and made it to No. 3 on the FBI's most wanted list, the highest position for a woman in 23 years.)
Jeffries attempts to find his Kerouacian hero in a Native American named Charlie Horse, an in-hiding murder suspect who says he was framed by Arizona police. Horse and his tale of being mistreated by the law harken back to an event Jeffries mentions in the book's introduction: In the 1830s, a group of American Indians held a sacred ritual, spilling blood to avenge the taking of their land: "With my blood and my spirit I lay a curse in the soil. As the white man eats so let the white man go mad. Let his mind be besieged with panic and confusion." Horse chooses to live by his wits on the streets in part because he doesn't answer to the money-driven law of the white man, but to the ancient law of his ancestors.
The most informative piece in the collection concerns Area 51, the mysterious top-secret Air Force base in the Southwest, and it doesn't directly concern UFOs. It turns out that most of the long-term laborers who have worked there are now dying off from mysterious cancers and ailments. The government won't reveal what materials they've been working with, information that might help the patients and their doctors.
As an examination of unusual subcultures, America's Back Porch pales next to such works as Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture, but it is an entertaining light read about limbos that could only be created in this country. It does raise a question, though: Where are the zany utopians of yesteryear?
What saves America's Back Porch from being a simple laundry list of minds gone astray is Jeffries' sense of adventure as he roots around America's underbelly. He quotes Jack Kerouac's famous lines "The only people for me
are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time"--but by the end of the book one has to wonder whether these lines were quoted for irony. Kerouac went on the road looking for love and kicks and the heart of America; the closest Jeffries gets to love or romance is an ex-CIA remote viewer (a psychic agent) who lives in an abandoned missile silo and is obsessed with finding Heather Tallchief, a woman who committed a supposedly perfect crime. (She made off with $4.1 million from an armored-car heist and made it to No. 3 on the FBI's most wanted list, the highest position for a woman in 23 years.)
Jeffries attempts to find his Kerouacian hero in a Native American named Charlie Horse, an in-hiding murder suspect who says he was framed by Arizona police. Horse and his tale of being mistreated by the law harken back to an event Jeffries mentions in the book's introduction: In the 1830s, a group of American Indians held a sacred ritual, spilling blood to avenge the taking of their land: "With my blood and my spirit I lay a curse in the soil. As the white man eats so let the white man go mad. Let his mind be besieged with panic and confusion." Horse chooses to live by his wits on the streets in part because he doesn't answer to the money-driven law of the white man, but to the ancient law of his ancestors.
The most informative piece in the collection concerns Area 51, the mysterious top-secret Air Force base in the Southwest, and it doesn't directly concern UFOs. It turns out that most of the long-term laborers who have worked there are now dying off from mysterious cancers and ailments. The government won't reveal what materials they've been working with, information that might help the patients and their doctors.
As an examination of unusual subcultures, America's Back Porch pales next to such works as Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture, but it is an entertaining light read about limbos that could only be created in this country. It does raise a question, though: Where are the zany utopians of yesteryear?
June 26, 2008
This book details some of the bizare sub cultures in America you would never know existed. Like religious rattlesnake handlers, vigilantes in Texas, bear wrestlers, plastic sureons for dogs...and the strange goes on.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews