Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier

By Hampton Sides and Larry Katzman

Book Overview

Harley-Davidson bikers - Grand Canyon river rats - Mormon archaeologists - Spelling bee prodigies - For more than fifteen years, the bestselling, award-winning author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture.

This sparkling mosaic of our country, in all its wild and poignant charm, "may be the best road trip you'll ever take--full of strange vision, hilarious detours, and sudden beauty in unlikely places" (The New Yorker).

Reporting for Outside, The New Yorker, and NPR, among other national media, the award-winning journalist has established a reputation not only as a wry observer of the contemporary American scene but also as one of our more inventive and versatile practitioners of narrative non-fiction.

In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of an apparent cabal of fabulously powerful military-industrialists, drop in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and join a giant techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a diverse gallery of American visionaries-- from the impossibly perky founder of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell Means to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the route of the historic Bataan Death March with veterans from Sides' acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost Soldiers. Sides also examines the nation that has emerged from the ashes of September 11, recounting the harrowing journeys of three World Trade Center survivors and deciding at the last possible minute not to "embed" on the Iraqi front-lines with the U.S. Marines.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400033551
• ISBN13: 9781400033553
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Interesting read

Great start to this collection of essays... "What is an American?" Most of these essays are very interesting reading... a few are just a bit slow. I've used the essay on Bass fishing in my HS English classes to highlight "good writing." My students have enjoyed scoring his work with the six traits... great writer!

Facets of America often unseen and unknown

This is the third book by Hampton Sides I have read. I absolutly loved it! Indepth insights into American subcultures, personalities, locations and events conveyed in masterful color and detail. Humor, pathos, irony, Sides elicits the full gamut of emotions. From the first page to the last, pure genius. Sides has become my favorite author. Can't wait for his next book.

More than great writing - great reporting

As a newspaper columnist for The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., I loath the well-written but poorly reported essay. That's why I'm so anxious to endorse Sides' "Americana," which is, to be blunt, the best collection of essays on beyond-the-press-conference America I've ever read. Sides is not only a master of language - "they survey the scene with frozen smiles, like old-time Kremlin leaders on a reviewing stand" - but an observer extraordinaire. What makes his pieces shine is his incredible attention to detail, his not only seeing the aging band Steppenwolf at the Harley gathering, but REALLY seeing them: "haggard dinosaurs with tubercular-blue skin, their scaly forms mailed in black leather." From bikers to Tupperware women, from skate boarders to national spelling bees, Sides shows us an America that you won't always find on prime time. And does so with an open mind, an insatiable curiosity and a keen wit. But what places the book at the forefront of such collections is two last-chapter essays - "Point of Impact," about 9/11 and "First," about the war in Iraq. Sides' humor is delicious, but when he gets serious, as he does for these two pieces, he can tell a gripping story like few other American writers. If you want to better understand Americans - and treat yourself to uncommonly great writing in the process - "Americana" is for you.

A few great articles and many decent pieces

These are magazine stories, mostly from Outside magazine and mostly enjoyable and well crafted. His best by far is "Point of Impact," about 9/11. Hair-raising, heart-breaking and impossible to forget, for better or worse. Had to put this one down a couple of times. Overwhelmed, grossed out, choked up. It would not be a bad idea to read it on every anniversary. "First," about the war in Iraq, is also memorable. An early article, "Murder in Falkner," gets under your skin, too. It would be a decent read without these, so it adds up to a better than average collection.