American Stories - Hardcover

Trillin, Calvin

4.05

139 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395593670 ISBN 13: 9780395593677

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1991

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Compiles twelve of the author's favorite nonfiction narratives that have appeared in "The New Yorker," capturing the spirit and rich detail of American living

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From Kirkus Reviews:

With this collection of ``American Chronicles'' from the pages of The New Yorker, Trillin (Enough's Enough, 1990, etc.), known for his sly drollery, displays his talents as a reporter, probing the wild heart of the nation in a dozen full-length pieces. If Truman Capote invented the nonfiction novel, as he claimed, and Norman Mailer devised variations on it, Trillin has perfected the nonfiction short story; moreover, his craftsmanship can contend with that of either Capote or Mailer at their best. With scant pyrotechnics but with lucid, organized prose, Trillin describes what happens when a Scout leader in Oregon is afflicted with homosexual pedophilia or a scratch farmer in Horse Cave, Kentucky, is persuaded that pot would be a good cash crop. He presents a Jekyll-and-Hyde movie reviewer in Texas and a sordid little murder case in Emporia, Kansas. There's manslaughter on the Virginia farm of a member of the patrician Saltonstall family, and the nasty activities of the Posse Comitatus in the fields of the American heartland. And though the author's land sometimes seems drenched in blood feuds, violence, and a surfeit of litigation, usually of the criminal sort, Trillin also offers an easygoing profile of ``Fats'' Goldberg, for whom he acts as a happy Boswell, and the story, gracefully moving, of an American's death in a distant land. Trillin's eye is sharp, of course. The list of ingredients in Ben and Jerry's ice cream, he tells us, ``was done in the sort of hand printing often used on menus that list a variety of herbal teas.'' He has an alert reporter's ear, too. One Kentuckian, in the words of the local sheriff, ``could come in here and sit down and talk you out of your shoes.'' Since life, as Trillin tells us, ``goes on with or without a reporter present,'' he thoughtfully provides a brief postscript to each tale to bring us up to date. Engrossing true stories, filled with liars, lawsuits, and laughs. Mind your shoes. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Most of these reports, originally appearing in the New Yorker , take a lengthier and more serious approach than that found in many of Trillin's previous collections ( U.S. Journal ; Travels with Alice ). Frequently he looks at the results of something gone rotten at the core of various American dreams. In a rural Kansas town, after the spouses of a minister and a housewife are killed within months of each other, the romantically entangled survivors are charged with murder ("Rumors Around Town"); in "I've Got Problems," a Nebraska farmer, blaming recent hard times on everyone from local banks to Mossad, is slain when he takes arms against local law enforcers. In a lighter vein, Trillin contrasts the business style of ice-cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield with that of Haagen-Dazs creator Reuben Mattus; he chronicles the collaboration of magicians Penn & Teller, and the newspaper careers of Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan and the drive-in movie critic known as Joe Bob Briggs. Despite their offbeat topics, these reports are diminished by a certain sameness.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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