US GuysUS Guys
the True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
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Book, 2006
Current format, Book, 2006, , Available .Book, 2006
Current format, Book, 2006, , Available . Offered in 0 more formatsA New York Times reporter traces his cross-country investigation of the character and quality of the American man, a journey during which he participated in such adventures as a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival, a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River, and a fight at an Oakland biker club.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter traces his cross-country investigation of the character and quality of the American man, a journey during which he participated in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival, led a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River, infiltrated a fighting biker gang, and more. 150,000 first printing.
US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is Charlie LeDuff's road trip into the heart of American manhood. No one knows this territory better than LeDuff, a national reporter for The New York Times, who has spent the last year on the job sites and at the kitchen tables of a vivid cast of ordinary men. From the jaded homicide detective in Detroit to the two-bit jockey at a race track in Miami, these are the everyday sons of the country: caught by change, trapped between their histories and dreams, whipsawed by an America they love but increasingly fail to understand. Although they come from every corner of the country, they speak a common language - an inadvertent poetry of dignity and distress captured by LeDuff's prose.
Heir to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male.
No one knows life's underbelly better than New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the "bibulous scribe of the working class" by his peers, he's made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer "not for people who have doormen, but for doormen." And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero.
Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is LeDuff's equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of today's American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo ("Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny"). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter traces his cross-country investigation of the character and quality of the American man, a journey during which he participated in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival, led a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River, infiltrated a fighting biker gang, and more. 150,000 first printing.
US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is Charlie LeDuff's road trip into the heart of American manhood. No one knows this territory better than LeDuff, a national reporter for The New York Times, who has spent the last year on the job sites and at the kitchen tables of a vivid cast of ordinary men. From the jaded homicide detective in Detroit to the two-bit jockey at a race track in Miami, these are the everyday sons of the country: caught by change, trapped between their histories and dreams, whipsawed by an America they love but increasingly fail to understand. Although they come from every corner of the country, they speak a common language - an inadvertent poetry of dignity and distress captured by LeDuff's prose.
Heir to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male.
No one knows life's underbelly better than New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the "bibulous scribe of the working class" by his peers, he's made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer "not for people who have doormen, but for doormen." And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero.
Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is LeDuff's equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of today's American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo ("Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny"). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
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- New York : Penguin Press, 2006.
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