U.S. JOURNAL

by Calvin Trillin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 1971

In these short pieces from his New Yorker feature ""U.S. Journal,"" Trillin quietly walks the line between the tendentious and the trivial, opening up the arena of ""middling to small"" people and events to his descriptive exactitude and humane sympathies. Political questions are mediated as social phenomena: the participants in a private hearing on hunger, Bethlehem Steel's strip-mining in Eastern Kentucky, a South Carolina black women's quilting enterprise, Brigham Young University's racial attitudes and a black student uprising at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the defeat of a pro-integration school board in Denver and an Arkansas town's response to Gerald L. K. Smith and his Passion Play. Seven pieces deal with the Army, the Lowenstein campaign, conscientious objection among Mennonites and Air Force regulars, etc.; they are gravely but never thumpingly pointed. Trillin has a newspaper background, and his capacity to tell his stories by concise accretion and indirection is also exhibited in such ""good bits"" as a filmmaker's murder by a hillbilly, an encounter with The World's Strongest Man, a snowmobile festival in Minnesota, a Carnegie Fund ""hero investigator,"" and other temptations to archness and inflated verite. Self-possessed, straight, with undertones of humor and good humor rather than wit, Trillin does not pander to his material or exploit it: smelling of truth, this is good work with a sufficiency of staying power.

Pub Date: March 29, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION