Synopses & Reviews
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 themovie. 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.
Review
"Mr. LeDuff has a distinct style for committing what the sociologist C. Wright Mills said was James Agee's forte: sociological poetry. . . . [He] has some Damon Runyon in him, some Raymond Chandler, and more good one-liners than a week's worth of machine-tooled sitcoms."
-The New York Times
"A fearless, clear-eyed companion into parts of America that rarely see print."
-Entertainment Weekly
Synopsis
From the New York Times bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy
A fearless, clear eyed companion into parts of America that rarely see print.”Entertainment Weekly
Charlie LeDuff has made a career out of his extraordinary ability to capture the spirit of the people and places he profiles. US Guys is his odyssey in search of the truth behind the American man, from a jaded homicide detective in Detroit to a two-bit jockey at a racetrack in Miami to a pair of lovers at a gay rodeo. With audacity, humor, and no small amount of physical pain, he captures a broad diversity of voices as they wrestle with an America they love but increasingly fail to understand.
About the Author
Charlie LeDuff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, formerly at the New York Times and the Detroit News, and currently on Detroit's Fox 2 News. He was one of several reporters who worked on The New York Times series "How Race Is Lived in America," which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He alsoproduced a ten-part television series of participatory journalism called O" for Discovery Times. LeDuff has covered the war in Iraq, crossed the border with Mexican migrants, and chronicled a Brooklyn fire house in the aftermath of 9/11. The author of Detroit, US Guys, and Work and Other Sins, he lives near Detroit.