Running After Antelope [Hardcover]

Scott Carrier (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1582431116 | ISBN-13: 978-1582431116 | Publication Date: February 19, 2001 | Edition: First Edition

In a thoroughly original collection of nonfiction stories, "This American Life" contributor Scott Carrier chronicles the West, his coming-of-age, and an unabashed passion for discovery. Scott Carrier has been traveling the West in search of stories for the better part of his life. Since 1983, some of what he's found has been broadcast on National Public Radio's, "All Things Considered" and most recently on Public Radio International's "This American Life. " Running After Antelope collects the best of these radio pieces, as well as longer stories written for Harper's and Esquire. Like In Our Time, which unifies its disparate contents through between-the-acts episodes drawn from Hemingway's war experiences, Running After Antelope strings its many-colored beads on a single narrative thread-Carrier's ongoing, passionate attempt to run down a pronghorn antelope. Scenes from this picaresque quest-odd, inspired, and most times futile-are juxtaposed with stories about little league, sibling rivalry, falling in love, and working in the journalist's trade. Together they form a most unique record of a most unique life, a life that embraces discovery and celebrates pursuit for the sake of the chase. "What do you think we should do?" I ask. "I think we should try it again. Let's find some more. "And so we do. We chase antelope off and on for two days, but, basically they just ditch us every time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The signs that Scott Carrier was a writer and not an athlete showed up early. At the age of 12, Carrier was the free safety and captain of the defense on his football team. During one game he got his teammates into a huddle and told them he was going to do something different:

We're going to line up in a six-three, but as they get set I'm going to say a haiku, and I want you guys to start moving around, dance around, stand on your head, do whatever you want. We'll kill them. Ready, break!

When the quarterback started his count, Carrier shouted, "The wind brings dry leaves enough to start a fire!" and his teammates froze. When asked by his coach what on earth he'd been doing, Carrier calmly replied, "We're running a haiku." When pressed for a rationale, he said simply, "It was just an idea. It didn't really work out like I thought it would. I'm ready to move on, if you are."

And move on he did, crisscrossing the country as a contributor for NPR for nearly two decades. Some of his radio pieces (as well as longer essays written for Esquire and Harper's) have been collected in Running After Antelope. Sometimes sad, sometimes haunting, often funny, Carrier writes about travels to war-torn areas, personal relationship crises, and, of course, his quest to chase down an antelope--thus perhaps validating his vertebrate-morphologist brother's so-called running hypothesis: that humans became upright in order to breathe better.

In the book's final essay, Carrier is chasing after an antelope he calls the Lone Male. His friends have kept the animal running for almost an hour when it crosses Carrier's path. Relatively fresh, he takes off after it, "And I laugh. I laugh and I run and it is, for sure, the best thing I've ever done. I have everything I need, the wilderness is unfolding in front of me."

In the end, little is resolved--the wars and relationships continue, the thesis remains unproven. But Carrier would be the first to remind us that the pursuit--be it for peace, love, or science--has a purpose unto itself. Running After Antelope celebrates that pursuit in engaging fashion. --Sunny Delaney

From Publishers Weekly

Radio meets print journalism in this slim, entertaining anthology of outtakes from Carrier's last 20 years as a writer, hitchhiker, radio producer and occasional war correspondent. The book consists of stories originally broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Public Radio International's This American Life; magazine articles originally published in Harper's and Esquire; and a narrative detailing Carrier's obsessive attempts to literally run down a pronghorn antelope. As with all anthologies, some pieces are more successful than others. The best story, "The Test," chronicles a temp job in which Carrier interviewed people on Medicaid support for schizophrenia, taking the agonizing responses and reducing them to statistics and cold data; in the piece's shattering climax, Carrier turns inward and forces himself to answer the same questions. Other stories focus on Carrier's rough-and-tumble encounters with memorable, oddball characters like his brother (a vertebrate morphologist who collected roadkill in the name of science) or the fundamentalist carpenters of "Windfall" (who were obsessed with Star Trek, the Trilateral Commission and Ted Kennedy). The least effective parts are Carrier's experiments as a foreign correspondent in Kashmir, Cambodia, and Chiapas, Mexico, where his touristic narratives are too thin for the gravity of the tragedies he's writing about. ("You'll never figure it out in ten days," a woman in Chiapas told him angrily. "It's pretty arrogant and stupid to even think you could.") The rest of the book, however, is more perceptive and honest, as well as funny. While this "greatest hits" selection may not propel Carrier into the celebrity ranks of fellow NPR alumni David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, it's a fine performance.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 130 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press; First Edition edition (February 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431116
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431116
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Unique, American Voice, July 27, 2001

By 

D. D. Fulton (Los Angeles, CA. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Running After Antelope (Hardcover)

Scott Carrier's collection of essays, Running After Antelope alternates sections about travel's to Cambodia, time spent interviewing the mentally ill, and beatnik hitchhiking adventures with brief, intercalary chapters, indexed by year, which describe his passion for animal of the title. Carrier is consumed by the idea of being able to run with these creatures, to track them and perhaps outrun them eventually. On several occasions we meet Scott's brother, a scientist who studies the respiratory systems of mammals. Their relationship is often engaging, as is Scott's relationship to the antelope themselves. Indeed, the author's voice, so easy to read along with after hearing it so many times on NPR, dominates the landscape to such a degree that the reader never really gets a clear view of the vistas, natural and metaphorical, that he attempts to exposit in these brief essay. As individual works, the essays are like existential snapshots of a hell always just below the surface. The best essay in the collection, The Test, describes Carrier's time as a field interviewer for the mentally ill. He meets several, decidedly disturbed individuals - a man who tells Carrier that he can read his mind with the help of a crystal he carries, a woman who was put on medication because she claims sex with angels, and an eighty year old man who responds to every question with a plaintive "I can't remember". Carrier's job plunges further into the heart of darkness when he decides to take the test himself, only to discover, half way through, that the results aren't going to be good. As starling, even heartbreaking, as this essay is, the fact that it is followed later on by a rather lighthearted, Charles Kuraltesque piece about hitching a ride across country with an aspiring art dealer - who incidentally, believes his brother to be a genius of the art world; I wonder if Carrier considered making a stronger parallel with his own brother - and then by two pieces of travel journalism in which Carrier, promisingly enough, rents a motorcycle to transverse the countryside, and then, after getting lost on his way back to the palatial hotel, promptly returns it. The rudiments of Carrier's dark vision of things not quite in their proper place (especially the author himself) do make themselves known from time to time, event these weaker essays. The problem is that the reader's focus is split between the narrator's neurosis (and it is a fascinating one) and the decidedly journalistic intent in many of these essays. The divide never seems to converge at any point, despite the contextual format which leads the reader to believe otherwise. The lack of tonal cohesion between the various pieces, though distracting, should not dissuade a good, long sitting with Carrier's book, however. The precision of his prose style, which sometimes boarders on the baroque, has been honed by years freelancing for public radio. As such, the writing is meant to stimulate the mind's eye. In an early essay, Carrier describes the quite, natural splendor of his Utah:

There are little birds in the trees, and big birds on the rock walls of the canyon - red rock walls in the shadow of the afternoon sun. A dirt road comes around and down and crosses over the stream, and in the pool below road a pale snake slides silent into the water and swims to the other side, holding something rather large in its mouth.

Assonance aside, these sorts of passages, brief and almost haiku-like, crop up throughout the book and provide the necessary calm and elegance to counter Carrier's dark and often morbid musings. It is strange that Scott Carrier, the brooding, almost transient voice so often heard amongst the wacky and the cranky on This American Life, should become a representative belle letterist for this new century. However, the hodgepodge of modes that make up Running After Antelope - memoir, travel essay, nature writing - seems a perfect fit for the era of the translucent computer and gourmet fast-food. Appetites change and morph throughout even a single sitting of reading. To this end, Scott Carrier's short collection of flawed but very often beautiful and haunting essays should provoke even the most distracted of readers.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Running to Stay Alive", March 12, 2001

By 

rich whitten (Olympia, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Running After Antelope (Hardcover)

Scott Carrier's theme in "Running After Antelope" is a description of his life, of my life, of everyman's life. Intercalated between short essays of his adventures are recurrent descriptions of Scott and his brother's hypothesis that they (humans) can outrun a pronghorn antelope. This metaphor fits a thinking man's quest in life. We all must keep running to really stay alive. This is some sort of by-product of consciousness I suppose. I predict that Scott will never succeed, but he must keep running. Most of us loose sight of what we should run after. This book gently reminds us without the usual prostelitizing. The sparkling essays are crystals without too much said. This is a soothing book, despite the horrors that are depicted. I plan to give it to everyone I know capable of introspection.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Science, human nature, war reporting --- it's all here, May 18, 2004

By 

ensiform (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Running After Antelope (Paperback)

A collection of pieces loosely based on the author's obsession, inspired by his biologist brother's studies, with literally running down a deer, as some say primitive men once did. In between the attempts to corraborate stories of Indian tribes who do this and trying to catch pronghorns in Wyoming, Carrier intersperses essays about his divorce, his attempts to produce radio segments on the road, his adventures in hitchhiking, and stories from global hot spots that he did for Esquire. None of these digressions in unwelcome, especially the latter, which are superb stories of the best and worst in human nature, of death and survival. Whether he's interviewing a Cambodian woman whose greatest relief is that she no longer has to spend her day making poison sticks to keep out the militia, or an Indian commander is Kashmir who says the daily carnage is only "friendly fire," Carrier knows how to get the quotes and anecdotes that stick with his readers for a long time.