US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man

By Charlie LeDuff

Book Overview

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 Timesreporter 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 Manis 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 the movie. 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594201064
• ISBN13: 9781594201066
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

fun book

This, for me, is a page-turner and i recommend it to any American MAN. it's laugh-out-loud funny, shocking, and utterly depressing all at the same time...

brillant (of course)

I caught Charlie's interview on the "Colbert Report" and just had to go out and buy his book. As it turns out, I knew Charlie from Ann Arbor, and he's at least as brilliant now as he was then. Bravo.

Versatile

Whether blue collar, white collar; whether a pragmatist or philosopher, this book will give you something to talk about. No matter what type of crowd I'm around, a beer hockey league or a wine and cheese party, I can bring up this book as a conversation piece. That rarely, if ever, happens with a book. Worth the read.

grin and grimace

LeDuff is a brilliant writer. He takes his film crew to the dark underside of the American Male Experience. It's not pretty but his observations are by turns shocking, astonishing, revolting, inspiring, stupefying, and often, very amusing. (*note-sense of humor on part of reader is most helpful.) He exposes the empty hype of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. He dons the gonzo biker persona to rumble with the Rats. He annoys a former junkie turned evangelist. He gets pounded into the ground as a rodeo bull rider, arena football player, and circus clown cum trapeze artist. All along the dangerous road he maintains his tough guy pose except when he's weeping. LeDuff has all the tools. This book will blow your mind.