Finding the Trapdoor

by Adam Hochschild

The vivid, suspenseful history books for which Adam Hochschild has become well known are only a portion of his work. All his life he has also been writing shorter pieces: about the writers he loves, about his unusual life story, and about his travels to far corners of the earth�four continents, for example, are included in this volume. Finding the Trapdoor collects the best of more than two decades’ worth of such articles, all of them previously published in a wide variety of magazines, from Mother Jones to the Village Voice to the New York Review of Books. The topics covered range from a visit to Amazon Indians several days’ travel from the nearest small town to a look at late 20th-century sex advice books to the story of how two of Hochschild’s personal heroes once fought on opposite sides of a battle in the Russian Civil War.

Adam Hochschild’s books include King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves; and Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley, and has written for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and many other magazines.

"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. An enthralling excursion around the world and into the heart."
- Publisher’s Weekly

"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.
- Barbara Ehrenreich

"A rich and rewarding adventure in the reading."
- Studs Terkel

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

Hochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire.

Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.

A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hoc...

Reviews

[Vanessa]

This is a great book for any traveler at heart, stuck in one spot. Full of colorful and brave (real) characters, with a hint of writer's indulgence.