Customer Reviews

Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales

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There is no place like home. And you can be thankful that you have no place like the homes Jake Halpern has visited. He somehow became the "Bad Homes Correspondent" at the _New Republic_. He kept writing stories about towns being eaten by sinkholes, homes built over burning coal mines, homes where "Welcome Home" would have had a touch of sarcasm to it. In _Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales_ (Houghton Mifflin), the intrepid Halpern goes to live in five unpromising homes. He is in quest of the answer to why people would voluntarily take and keep homes in hellish or threatening areas. He does not find profound answers; they like their homes because these are their homes. He does, however, introduce us to some funny and strange characters, and shows us how they make themselves improbably at home.

Princeville, North Carolina is a town inundated by Hurricane Floyd, but Thad Knight came back to his ruined home, and other citizens returned. Whittier, Alaska, is a peculiar town that consists essentially of one 14-story high rise, and about 200 people live there. They stay inside a lot of the time, because the temperatures are frigid and the winds are killers. To get to it, you have to drive through a tunnel over two miles long. Millie Decker is 82 years old, a former rodeo rider, and has an address that would be coveted by Hollywood hopefuls, in Malibu. She has not abandoned it for any of the infamous fires that regularly come her way, fighting each one by wet gunnysacks. Ambrose Besson is a Storm Rider on Grand Isle, Louisiana. Others take the bridge to the mainland, but he stays home and cooks with his fellow storm riders. Jack Thompson will book you a spell in his bed and breakfast in Hawaii. Of course, you have to trek across a live lava field to get to Jack's; "... there is always the possibility of taking a bad step and falling downward into an active lava tube." The lava is all around and may well take Jack's house someday.

There isn't much they can really do by staying. It does not make much sense, to others, but of course it doesn't have to. In the epilogue of the book, Halpern goes back to these strange friends he has made, and tells them about each other, and finds that they easily sympathize with their fellows in the book. Jack, for instance, upon being told about Thad Knight, says, "It just sounds like another person who really likes his home and is willing to put up with whatever might come along with it." Most people are interested in conventionally making home life bigger and easier and inevitably more expensive and complicated. Read this amusing book about these mild kooks and realize that not all of them live in dangerous homes.

I heard Jake Halpern interviewed on NPR and had to buy the book. He's fascinated with far away places, and the people who live there. He answers the question I think we've all had when traveling "who lives here, why, and what are they like?"

Halpern takes on his journey from one edge of America to the other visiting small communities at the edge of civilization. We get to know the people who live in relative danger and seclusion.

What I found interesting was that many of the folks he brings us along to meet are more afraid of living in cities than staying in the extreme locations where they've been for years. Their feeling of stability living in an outwardly unstable environment tells us something about the power of home, the power of place in our lives.

Halpern has an easy, flowing writing style that doesn't get in the way of the story and is very readable.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it quickly. It's been a couple of months now since I finished, and I've found myself thinking back often to the people I met through Halpern, unique people living in unique locations.

This book is a great combination of local history, folklore, and tales of individuals who fight and win daily battles against mother nature. The strength of the book lies in the character development that takes place in each chapter. Halpern's first person narrative allows you to participate in the struggle's of the protagonists.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jake Halpern's travel memoir of extreme places and the people who chose to live in them. Halpern's writing style is disciplined and readable--an ideal combination for a journalist--with just enough of a sprinkling of the wicked turn of phrase to keep the reader engaged and laughing. Halpern brings his subjects to vibrant life, and makes me want to know what has happened to them since his writing. I look forward to a volume two. Perhaps Halpern could explore whether those who "brave home" are a dying breed? Is there a next generation of extreme inhabitors awaiting discovery?

Extremely entertaining! Fun to read! Interesting characters! Unmatched locales! I returned again and again to this wonderful book during my spare time. I'm not sure Halpern really comes up with explanations for why people live in such dangerous, out-of-the-way places, but his descriptions of those people and their homes are simply fascinating. Read it--and maybe you'll be looking to buy a home in Royal Gardens, Hawaii!

Jake Halpern takes on strange human habitats of our country and dives in to discover just why there are still people that live (or ever did live!) in these places. In each case, his chapter delves into the location, its uniqueness that makes it seemingly unhabitatible. These are places that are likely to be uninhabitable if not for human inventions like airplanes, air conditioning, indoor heat, and other modern marvels.
His stories take us around the country, from a small flood-prone town in North Carolina, an incredibly isolated village (though it seems more like a commune) in Alaska, to the Mailbu Hills where among the luxurious wealth live a family of ranchers that continue to fight the region's frequent firefighters on their own. In each locale, Halpern spends a significant time there, and often stays over for a few days with people who are braving the odds to live in these extreme locales. This allows him to dig deep into their rationals for continuing to live in such strange places. For example, he spends time with a woman in a very isolated spot in Alaska who is trying to stay hidden from her husband. For others, such as an old man in NC, that is where he was born and raised and lived his whole life, for him there is simply nowhere else to go.

These stories are funny, poignant and interesting. Each makes for a very interesting read and through the set of chapters (where each is like a story of its own) the reader gets to see just how strange and weird our country and its people can be... but not just strange, just how brave and devoted they can be.

This is a must read!!!

Jake Halpern has written a remarkable first book. Not yet thirty years old, he's called numerous cities spread over three continents "home." Like most of us on this highly mobile world, home represented little more than a temporary base of operations. Working as a fact checker for the New Republic, Jake became increasingly fascinated by the concept of home as a central part of one's identity, and by those people so rooted to a particular place they would do anything to remain anchored there.

After extensive research, Jake set out on an odyssey that took him to Princeville, North Carolina, a town submerged by a flood; Whittier, Alaska, a community at the end of a two and a half-mile long tunnel, and a community where almost everyone lives in a single, 14-story high rise; the "Lava-Side Inn," the last occupied home in a Hawaiian subdivision that's been cut off by a volcano's active flow; Malibu, California, where the descendants of pioneers still battle the wildlifes that sweep their region with alarming regularity; and Grand Isle, Louisiana, a lone outpost in the Gulf of Mexico where a few hardy souls always ride out the worst hurricanes.

In these pages, you'll get to know the independent, self-sufficient, heroic souls that Jake met during his journeys. You're very much the armchair traveler as he invites you into his motel room, the front seat of his rental car, and into the homes and lives of these memorable people. This is a great book to feed the mind and the heart.--William C. Hall

Imagine living in a home surrounded by lava flows, or on a small island where hurricanes are common and the one road out will be covered with water well before the storm hits. Jack Halpern has given a view, not only of five very extreme living conditions, but also of the strong-willed people who tenaciously cling to the place they call home. It is hard to decide which is more memorable, the unforgiving land or the people who weather the elements. For these hardy souls, home is a place of roots and continuity, a tenuous place in reality but a concrete place in mind, a place that truly defines them.

Many philosophers have attempted a definition of "home" as more than just the physical location where you live. Jake Halpern actually comes pretty close to that elusive definition in this enjoyable travelogue. Halpern visits some rugged regular folks who have made their homes in unlikely or dangerous locations. While this book is now a few years old, a couple of Halpern's stories have gained some new poignancy post-Katrina – those being Halpern's visit with the old-timers of a Louisiana island that could be literally wiped off the map by any major hurricane, and who have made a lifestyle of riding out the storms; and the story of a retired gentleman in North Carolina who refused to break his deep ties with his town and its history, even after a major flood destroyed his house. Here Halpern also reports on an odd small town in Alaska that is almost totally contained within a single high-rise and is also almost completely cut off from the outside world; a loner in Hawaii who perseveres in his house even after being totally surrounded by lava from an active volcano; and the diehard Wild West-ers who are still living oldschool style in Malibu and fighting back brush fires themselves. Within these narratives of hardy souls and their lives of creeping hardship, Halpern discovers why these folks stay in their precarious locations, and why each has a stronger sense of "home" than most of the rest of us. Halpern's attempts to get philosophical could be a little stronger, but he reports successfully on some very hardy and likeable folks. [~doomsdayer520~]

Halpern has terrific subject matter here--an isolated man living in a lava-ridden town, an indoor city in Alaska, a submerged North Carolina town, and more--but what makes this book work is Halpern's personality. He appears to be a truly amicable guy, and he gets his subjects to open up to him and invite him into their lives. Halpern doesn't just pop by for an afternoon interview, he gets invited to stay for days and immerse himself in these people's lifestyles. His connection with his subjects is evident in the fact that he gets invited back for repeat visits when his book is complete, and he thoughtfully includes updates on everyone at the close of the book. The reader can't help but be touched by all these people living in extreme circumstances, and I was sad to leave them when the book came to a close.

Usually, I dislike when non-fiction authors expound on the philosophical reasons for their subjects' behavior. Halpern, however, did an excellent job tying together the common threads that made people refuse to leave their homes despite the risks. People who have been rooted in their home for generations as well as those who have been transplanted to their own version of paradise make similar arguments for staying in their homes no matter what.

Halpern manages to find a Louisiana backwater in which trailers are constantly washed out into the ocean, as well as multi-million dollar homes on the Malibu coast that are constantly in fire danger and repeatedly re-built. The desire to "brave home" crosses economic and cultural lines across the country, and Halpern invites the reader to learn about some unique cases. Overall, this book is highly recommended based on the subject matter and on Halpern's excellent delivery.