Hella Nation
In Search of the Lost Tribes of America
-
-
4.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- £3.99
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
Hella Nation charts Wright's deeply personal journey, from his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley to his raw portrait of a Hollywood über-agent turned war documentarian and hero of America's far right. Along the way he meets runaway teens in Hollywood earning corporate dollars as skateboard pitchmen, radical anarchists plotting the overthrow of capitalism from tree-sits in the Oregon rainforest and young American troops on the hunt for terrorists in the combat zones of the Middle East. His subjects are people for whom The American Dream is either just out of grasp, or something they have chosen to reject altogether.
Sometimes frightening, usually profane, and often darkly comic, Hella Nation is Wright's meticulously observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rolling Stone writer Wright (Generation Kill), offers 12 tales of outsiders, people more or less living off the grid in mainstream America. He profiles, for example, a member of Delta Company in Kandahar in southeastern Afghanistan dueling with the Taliban; a fun-loving regular at a dance hall; a committed local anarchist engaging in street theater at a global trade conference; a pastor of the Aryan Nation preaching against the evils of blacks and Jews and other nonwhite "mud people"; and two HIV-infected former porn stars. As a former editor of Hustler magazine, Wright recognizes the magic in Seth Warshavsky, a con man with a mind full of schemes in the porn world of bartered desire. There is some top-drawer writing among weaker essays, but the total effect reflects a literary rebel who wants to break convention.
