Customer Reviews

Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels

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I fell in love with this book's well-written and passionate articles a year ago and decided to teach it in my second-semester English composition class. My students, working-class youngsters from New York State, found it their favorite: it taught them about style in writing without being too abstract or introspective. They had energetic discussions about the issues Hochschild raises and the people he portrays: "Fishhooks and Chickens" led to some strong opinions on U.S. foreign policy, "Summer of Violence" prompted them to discuss their own civil-rights heroes, and the piece on ex-racist Floyd Cochran elicited opinions on reform and forgiveness. And their own writing showed that they learned a great deal from Hochschild's stylistic grace. This book will be a great document of its times for many, many years.