Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels

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.

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.