Finding the Trapdoor

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 these articles in the same warm autobiographical voice that made the 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 here as well: profiles of an adoptive Gypsy and of a governor general’s son turned revolutionary, essays about Ernest Hemmingway 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 the battlefield.