Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels

Adam Hochschild

Jan 2017 · Syracuse University Press

About this ebook

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 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.