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I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son
From one of the most ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voices in literary a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld, exposing a raw personal journey along the way.
Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he’s preparing for his last obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He insinuates himself with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball, and his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears.
I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son , blistering and deeply personal, records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.
Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he’s preparing for his last obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He insinuates himself with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball, and his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears.
I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son , blistering and deeply personal, records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 10, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
April 21, 2015
(Composed for a class)
I want to like Kent Russell. We have a lot in common: a love of horror movies and islands; fathers who need to talk like “sharks need to swim”; a tendency to root for the slob over the snob. And the subjects of the essays collected in I am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are all inherently interesting, at least to men of a certain age and morbid disposition: what it’s like to experience the Insane Clown Posse’s orgy of white trash ecstasy, the Gathering; what it’s like to attend Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead fame’s workshop on special effects gore; how Amish youth steal away to play baseball; the life story of an unlikable hockey goon.
And yet in these essays something is missing, something revelatory and profoundly dark, a Beast in the Jungle always circled but never pounced on. They touch on hyper-masculinity, antisocialness, the death-drive, the love/hate relationship between fathers and sons, and yet they never embrace any one thing completely. At their best, these reports are preliminary probes into the chances of living beyond nihilism; at their worst, they seem like self-indulgent cries for help.
Russell is no fan of meaningful segues, and often mistakes clumps of trees for forests. On one page he will regale a Wikipedia-like history of Daniel Boone, and on the next he will complain about his father (a favorite topic he believes the reader will find endlessly interesting). He pussyfoots around issues to the point I’m not sure what the issues are. He leads you down an alley where he doesn’t even do the service of mugging you, but instead shuffles away with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.
Much of what makes this book frustrating can be blamed on the fractured multi-part storyline wedged between each self-contained essay, in which Russell erratically narrates visiting his parents, and in particular his father, in San Francisco. It is this chartless, rambling, id-ridden ocean the reader must somehow navigate in order to arrive at the relatively stable shores of the essays proper. To give you a feeling of what the experience of reading these sections is like, I will describe what happens in the middle of “9/20/13,” the third of these inserts and the third day of Russell’s visit. After complaining about his troglodyte father once again, Russell mentions his dad is “maybe an inch or two shorter than my favorite hockey player of all time, Theo Fleury.” Russell then spends three pages outlining the biography of Theo Fleury before he begins talking about Napoleon, because “popular misconception has it that Napoleon was short.” Then, two pages later, he is back complaining about his father, who “refuses to wear boys’ sizes and so gives all new pairs of Costco slacks to my mother to hem.” We only have to wait two pages before he is back talking about Fleury, and committing the mortal sin of quoting liberally from a much more interesting book, namely Fleury’s autobiography. NO ONE IS STEERING THE SHIP I wrote in the middle of this section.
It is ironic these sections, intended to give some semblance of narrative arc, leave this reviewer, for one, outraged and exhausted. They are a platform for Russell to include barely articulated yet overwrought rants. “Is it that I say nuts to the faux-biblical jargon of authenticity,” Russell writes in one, “with its consumerist undertow and accessorized cant of separation and lost harmony? Instead I should just try to wrap my head around the infinite extent of my relations and thank God I am like other men?”
If you can survive the primal and impotent rage these sections barely contain, you will eventually read one essay almost worth the price of admission, “Mithradates of Fond Du Lac.” This essay, which focuses on a man named Tim’s attempt to become impervious to venom by repeatedly being bitten by snakes, comes the closest to reaching that dark revelation I believe Russell is forever attempting to access. Here he is describing the atmosphere as Tim tries to goad a snake into biting him:
“She writhed and lunged about like a downed but sentient power line. Using a smaller gauge, Tim pegged her, picked her up, and held her out to us spectators. She yawned, her pink gullet bracketed by fangs winking drops of venom. Everyone in that room was, deep down, a misanthrope who had never quite lost his adolescent fascination with the death act, snake on rat, who maybe still gazed upon it with a sort of jealousy.”
Tim’s quest is myopic and understandable: he’s been beaten back by a world he doesn’t understand and which only seems intent on hurting him. He wants to inoculate himself from pain. He wants to be made numb. “If I had the time and the money,” he says at one point, “I’d become immune to everything.”
It is in these moments, when Russell allows his subjects to speak for themselves, to act out and represent his own adolescent impulses, that the book becomes absorbing. But too often Russell the reporter/narrator will intrude with his insights, which do not complicate matters so much as they obfuscate them. It is alright to be a shiftless loafer afraid to commit to anything; I am one of that pack. But when confronted by someone else’s barely digested experiences regurgitated into an essay, it would help to have some reason for wanting to swallow the slop down.
To camouflage the fact he has gained no wisdom in his journeys, Russell overwrites: beers are never just drunk, they are “lisped.” Metaphors are lumped on top of metaphor like a mud pile (“down his trunkish right foreleg was a rune of a scar tissue like lightning along an elm.”) This overwriting runs the gamut from annoying to incomprehensible (“the water far below him was the bluish slate of fancy cats”).
The cover of I am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son is a photograph of Kent Russell wearing a sandwich board which advertises the title. He looks sheepish, apologetic, as if he’s wearing the board as punishment. He is not making eye contact with the reader. He is literally putting up a front. Kent Russell is timid, but he’s also afraid: afraid to attend the final performance of the Gathering, afraid to see if the Amish win the ballgame, afraid to connect with anyone or anything. “Don’t flatter yourself,” Russell’s father berates him over his plan to write his experiences into a book. “Who the fuck would want to read about this?” I would, for one, if Kent Russell would stop every once in a while to look me in the eye and tell me something.
I want to like Kent Russell. We have a lot in common: a love of horror movies and islands; fathers who need to talk like “sharks need to swim”; a tendency to root for the slob over the snob. And the subjects of the essays collected in I am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are all inherently interesting, at least to men of a certain age and morbid disposition: what it’s like to experience the Insane Clown Posse’s orgy of white trash ecstasy, the Gathering; what it’s like to attend Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead fame’s workshop on special effects gore; how Amish youth steal away to play baseball; the life story of an unlikable hockey goon.
And yet in these essays something is missing, something revelatory and profoundly dark, a Beast in the Jungle always circled but never pounced on. They touch on hyper-masculinity, antisocialness, the death-drive, the love/hate relationship between fathers and sons, and yet they never embrace any one thing completely. At their best, these reports are preliminary probes into the chances of living beyond nihilism; at their worst, they seem like self-indulgent cries for help.
Russell is no fan of meaningful segues, and often mistakes clumps of trees for forests. On one page he will regale a Wikipedia-like history of Daniel Boone, and on the next he will complain about his father (a favorite topic he believes the reader will find endlessly interesting). He pussyfoots around issues to the point I’m not sure what the issues are. He leads you down an alley where he doesn’t even do the service of mugging you, but instead shuffles away with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.
Much of what makes this book frustrating can be blamed on the fractured multi-part storyline wedged between each self-contained essay, in which Russell erratically narrates visiting his parents, and in particular his father, in San Francisco. It is this chartless, rambling, id-ridden ocean the reader must somehow navigate in order to arrive at the relatively stable shores of the essays proper. To give you a feeling of what the experience of reading these sections is like, I will describe what happens in the middle of “9/20/13,” the third of these inserts and the third day of Russell’s visit. After complaining about his troglodyte father once again, Russell mentions his dad is “maybe an inch or two shorter than my favorite hockey player of all time, Theo Fleury.” Russell then spends three pages outlining the biography of Theo Fleury before he begins talking about Napoleon, because “popular misconception has it that Napoleon was short.” Then, two pages later, he is back complaining about his father, who “refuses to wear boys’ sizes and so gives all new pairs of Costco slacks to my mother to hem.” We only have to wait two pages before he is back talking about Fleury, and committing the mortal sin of quoting liberally from a much more interesting book, namely Fleury’s autobiography. NO ONE IS STEERING THE SHIP I wrote in the middle of this section.
It is ironic these sections, intended to give some semblance of narrative arc, leave this reviewer, for one, outraged and exhausted. They are a platform for Russell to include barely articulated yet overwrought rants. “Is it that I say nuts to the faux-biblical jargon of authenticity,” Russell writes in one, “with its consumerist undertow and accessorized cant of separation and lost harmony? Instead I should just try to wrap my head around the infinite extent of my relations and thank God I am like other men?”
If you can survive the primal and impotent rage these sections barely contain, you will eventually read one essay almost worth the price of admission, “Mithradates of Fond Du Lac.” This essay, which focuses on a man named Tim’s attempt to become impervious to venom by repeatedly being bitten by snakes, comes the closest to reaching that dark revelation I believe Russell is forever attempting to access. Here he is describing the atmosphere as Tim tries to goad a snake into biting him:
“She writhed and lunged about like a downed but sentient power line. Using a smaller gauge, Tim pegged her, picked her up, and held her out to us spectators. She yawned, her pink gullet bracketed by fangs winking drops of venom. Everyone in that room was, deep down, a misanthrope who had never quite lost his adolescent fascination with the death act, snake on rat, who maybe still gazed upon it with a sort of jealousy.”
Tim’s quest is myopic and understandable: he’s been beaten back by a world he doesn’t understand and which only seems intent on hurting him. He wants to inoculate himself from pain. He wants to be made numb. “If I had the time and the money,” he says at one point, “I’d become immune to everything.”
It is in these moments, when Russell allows his subjects to speak for themselves, to act out and represent his own adolescent impulses, that the book becomes absorbing. But too often Russell the reporter/narrator will intrude with his insights, which do not complicate matters so much as they obfuscate them. It is alright to be a shiftless loafer afraid to commit to anything; I am one of that pack. But when confronted by someone else’s barely digested experiences regurgitated into an essay, it would help to have some reason for wanting to swallow the slop down.
To camouflage the fact he has gained no wisdom in his journeys, Russell overwrites: beers are never just drunk, they are “lisped.” Metaphors are lumped on top of metaphor like a mud pile (“down his trunkish right foreleg was a rune of a scar tissue like lightning along an elm.”) This overwriting runs the gamut from annoying to incomprehensible (“the water far below him was the bluish slate of fancy cats”).
The cover of I am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son is a photograph of Kent Russell wearing a sandwich board which advertises the title. He looks sheepish, apologetic, as if he’s wearing the board as punishment. He is not making eye contact with the reader. He is literally putting up a front. Kent Russell is timid, but he’s also afraid: afraid to attend the final performance of the Gathering, afraid to see if the Amish win the ballgame, afraid to connect with anyone or anything. “Don’t flatter yourself,” Russell’s father berates him over his plan to write his experiences into a book. “Who the fuck would want to read about this?” I would, for one, if Kent Russell would stop every once in a while to look me in the eye and tell me something.
January 9, 2026
DNF: Cutting bait at page 87. Russell takes on issues of interest to me, hypermasculinity, the evolving definition of what it means to be an American to men of a certain age and people of differing educational accomplishment, finding community on the fringes, but this is never interesting; there are no observations that are new or bracing, and the storytelling is all over the place. Maybe it is me, as a matter of fact, I will just say, yes, it is me, but Russell's BFF and father are boring people, and he spends a lot of time talking about them.
January 29, 2015
I really wanted to love this book. I made it about half way through before I realized that I probably wasn't going to. I finished it hoping I'd grow to love it. It just didn't happen. And that was disappointing because this is one of my favorite genres and I actually enjoy the off-kilter.
I think the problem I had with this book is the cohesion. It lacked it. I get that this was essays and they were all linked by an undertone of his family's screwed-up-iness and, in theory, a study on masculinity. The problem is that I don't think it did either well enough. Really, this should be two books. A true memoir would have been a treat from this author. It's obvious he has an amazing story to tell, one that I would be honored to sit down and devour. The story is there, but the lack of flow doesn't make this a true memoir. It wants to be a deep essay on masculinity and how that's perceived, both internally and externally, but adding in the family situations just made it feel broken.
Overall, this isn't bad for a first book. I think I was also a bit disappointed that instead of a book of new material, some was recycled from previous published articles by this author. I do realize this is done quite often, but the lack of focus in the book really distracted from his message.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy what I read. The stories themselves, taken in small bites, were decent enough. It's just not what the description led me to believe I was getting into. It really does feel like the author is trying too hard. I liked it enough that I would pick up something else by this author, but I'd probably peek at other reviews first to see if he (or a really good editor) were able to pull it together into one unit.
Recommended for those die hard memoir folks, but just know what you're getting into.
I think the problem I had with this book is the cohesion. It lacked it. I get that this was essays and they were all linked by an undertone of his family's screwed-up-iness and, in theory, a study on masculinity. The problem is that I don't think it did either well enough. Really, this should be two books. A true memoir would have been a treat from this author. It's obvious he has an amazing story to tell, one that I would be honored to sit down and devour. The story is there, but the lack of flow doesn't make this a true memoir. It wants to be a deep essay on masculinity and how that's perceived, both internally and externally, but adding in the family situations just made it feel broken.
Overall, this isn't bad for a first book. I think I was also a bit disappointed that instead of a book of new material, some was recycled from previous published articles by this author. I do realize this is done quite often, but the lack of focus in the book really distracted from his message.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy what I read. The stories themselves, taken in small bites, were decent enough. It's just not what the description led me to believe I was getting into. It really does feel like the author is trying too hard. I liked it enough that I would pick up something else by this author, but I'd probably peek at other reviews first to see if he (or a really good editor) were able to pull it together into one unit.
Recommended for those die hard memoir folks, but just know what you're getting into.
January 25, 2015
This book was a good example of how a publisher's blurb doesn't provide enough information. This book was a depressing read, largely because Russell and the people/scenes he investigates and writes about are fringe elements of some odd and frightening world. I get that this can appeal to many people, but it doesn't to me. It was like watching Saw or some other psychologically disturbing and twisted examination of our base ugliness.
I've enjoyed writers who can profile the misery behind the smile, the tormented people living lives of superficial joy, and a host of other psychological explorations. This book, however, was an unsavory stew of snippets from both Russell's personal life and his investigative journalism. It was unpleasant to read and his style seemed forced, particularly when he used thesaurus-waving words to describe the mundane. It just seemed out of place and contrived.
This might be to your liking if you enjoy the stranger, odder, more dangerous fringe elements of humanity. But for me, it was hard to digest and took the joy out of my soul every time I read from it. No thank you, Kent.
I've enjoyed writers who can profile the misery behind the smile, the tormented people living lives of superficial joy, and a host of other psychological explorations. This book, however, was an unsavory stew of snippets from both Russell's personal life and his investigative journalism. It was unpleasant to read and his style seemed forced, particularly when he used thesaurus-waving words to describe the mundane. It just seemed out of place and contrived.
This might be to your liking if you enjoy the stranger, odder, more dangerous fringe elements of humanity. But for me, it was hard to digest and took the joy out of my soul every time I read from it. No thank you, Kent.
April 24, 2015
Yeah this wasn't so bad, but it also wasn't so good. I wrote a really long essay on the Gathering of the Juggalos when I was eighteen, and it was only maybe 30% less good than what Kurt Russell gives us. His style is very "now," very committed to dry ironies and the idea that fathers and sons might as well be separate species. He goes out and does the thing that "timely" writers have always been doing-- collecting stories from society's margins and reselling them through a lens meant to appease the du jour tastes of his audience. Read what he has to say about the Iraq War, White Trash people, his father's generation. Actually, no. Don't. You can find it all elsewhere written with less apathy and metaphors with the potential to age past 2016.
July 23, 2015
What is the point of this book? Just a few essays in, I thought, who the hell cares? Why do I want to read about how Russell went to an Insane Clown Posse festival or him hanging out with a guy who gets poisonous snake bites while having to read with pointless interludes about his Vietnam crazed father?
My final straw was having to endure another chapter about hockey. The only reason I have stopped reading a book without finishing it is when I have no interest in what is going to happen in the coming pages or the writer has irritated me to the point of exhaustion.
Now, I can read another book that I will actually finish!
My final straw was having to endure another chapter about hockey. The only reason I have stopped reading a book without finishing it is when I have no interest in what is going to happen in the coming pages or the writer has irritated me to the point of exhaustion.
Now, I can read another book that I will actually finish!
January 24, 2015
After I read Kent Russell's book, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, I looked him up to see what else he's written. Although this is his first book, he is all over the internet, having been published articles in Harper's, n+1, The Believer, Huffington Post, GQ, and so on. How have I missed him?
As it happens, most of the pieces he's had published so far are reprinted in this new collection, so we all have a chance to catch up with one volume. The question is whether you will want to.
The theme in this collection of essays and reporting is masculinity. Some of the articles are profiles of manly men, such as a hockey enforcer, a snake tamer, Russell's friend who joined the army. Many of the pieces are about Russell's father, a pugnacious stay-at-home dad who used to be a lawyer and still swears and postures like the sailor he once was. I imagined him as Popeye.
While reading about life as the son of Popeye is entertaining in small doses, that's also the problem. If we assume that Russell's father is not really a cartoon, then the depiction of him as such seems pointlessly mean. Russell portrays their relationship as good if a little competitive, so publicly showing him as a comical bantam rooster seems somehow passive aggressive.
The essays I enjoyed most were the profiles rather than the family tales -- the Amish baseball players, the returning combat soldier. I'll be looking for more of Russell's reporting, but I might just skip his personal essays.
As it happens, most of the pieces he's had published so far are reprinted in this new collection, so we all have a chance to catch up with one volume. The question is whether you will want to.
The theme in this collection of essays and reporting is masculinity. Some of the articles are profiles of manly men, such as a hockey enforcer, a snake tamer, Russell's friend who joined the army. Many of the pieces are about Russell's father, a pugnacious stay-at-home dad who used to be a lawyer and still swears and postures like the sailor he once was. I imagined him as Popeye.
While reading about life as the son of Popeye is entertaining in small doses, that's also the problem. If we assume that Russell's father is not really a cartoon, then the depiction of him as such seems pointlessly mean. Russell portrays their relationship as good if a little competitive, so publicly showing him as a comical bantam rooster seems somehow passive aggressive.
The essays I enjoyed most were the profiles rather than the family tales -- the Amish baseball players, the returning combat soldier. I'll be looking for more of Russell's reporting, but I might just skip his personal essays.
June 22, 2015
I'm only in the first part of the book, and so far, it is a bit disjointed. The author seems to leap from thought to thought and then back without clear segueways.
I finished this book and the whole thing reads more like a disjointed and unrelated set of essays. I was unimpressed
I finished this book and the whole thing reads more like a disjointed and unrelated set of essays. I was unimpressed
April 16, 2015
Dude rules. Much insight into being a slightly aimless intellectual guy.
April 26, 2015
2.5 stars...An ambitious nonfiction book that I don't think quite comes together in the end. Kent Russell has collected several longer pieces (some previously published) that seem to center around extreme ideas of masculinity. Russell meets a hockey enforcer, a man practicing "self-immunization" with deadly snakes, an Australian modern-day Robinson Crusoe, and a number of outsized characters at the "Gathering of the Juggalos". These pieces are cut together with chapters describing Russell's relationship with his father, a cranky but attentive veteran who doesn't want to be written about and isn't sure full-time writing is a secure choice for his son. Kent, of course, does write about his Dad. There's a coming together in a final road trip chapter that feels so false and unearned on the page that I half-expected some sort of postmodern fake out. Russell has a talent for long-form journalism but the meaning he attempts to derive about how his travels connect to his own relationships really doesn't come across.
February 12, 2017
Kent Russell is witty, hyper-smart, and perceptive. What others say Russell lacks in cohesion, I think he makes up for in voice. This is a story about masculinity, about being an outcast, about what it means to be a part of a family and community and find your own sense of self. Written as a series of observational, first-person essays, he weaves through stories of other outcasts – other men who've lost their way or seem sure they've somehow found it on the outskirts of normalcy. Face-painted Juggalos at the Gathering or snake enthusiasts in a venom-induced coma or men on deserted islands who can never stop talking.
He also is a Florida kid who graduated from UF's j-school not too long before me and acknowledges some of my old professors in the back of the book, which I thought was cool.
I have a feeling Russell is going to be big. I'm in for whatever's next.
He also is a Florida kid who graduated from UF's j-school not too long before me and acknowledges some of my old professors in the back of the book, which I thought was cool.
I have a feeling Russell is going to be big. I'm in for whatever's next.
May 11, 2015
Although there are interesting passages, overall it fails to come together. Long stretches of the book are simply dull. Most of it is trying so hard that it's an effortful read with no payoff. It's no wonder the book jacket offers no insight -- it is a collection of whiny blogger ramblings about nothing at all.
May 11, 2015
I am not going to lie. I came to despise this book. I felt saddled by it, carrying it around like an albatross. I don't know how this thing got good reviews; obviously someone was entertained by Russell's anecdotes. I could barely finish it.
April 15, 2015
I need to go read some essays by women now.
July 19, 2015
Don't use "homologous" when you could just have used "analogous."
November 8, 2017
Kent Russell knows his words, even if I don’t. Be it words for military instances, or parts and pieces of the RV, he’s able to masterfully weave them within his memoir. The memoir is divided between the interactions between him, his father, and the rest of the family; and other essays, where the author explores the lives, ideas and experiences of those around him, especially men that are obsessed with death, survival, and risk-taking. They are the Juggalos of the mid-west; or Tim, who practices Mithridatism (look it up) and offers his hand nonchalantly for poisonous snakes to bite; or Theo Fleury, a mad-man of a hockey player; or even his childhood best-friend.
"I Am Sorry to Think I have Raised a Timid Son" is a beautiful collage interwoven with Russel’s personal experience in exploration of masculinity within America.
"I Am Sorry to Think I have Raised a Timid Son" is a beautiful collage interwoven with Russel’s personal experience in exploration of masculinity within America.
May 1, 2018
Much to appreciate. Impressively evocative, very funny, insightful and perceptive. Clearly the work of a very bright guy. Sometimes the obscure vocab choices feel inspired, sometimes forced. I thought it held together better than some other commentators, although I agree that it could have been improved in that regard. I’m also fine with the lack of any kind of epiphany — on questions that have defied singular answers for ages (e.g., what kind of man should I be?), a collection of diverse, incomplete, not-always-consistent personal insights usually indicates wisdom, intellectual honesty, and self-awareness far more so than does a committed thesis defense.
May 17, 2018
I have enjoyed Russell’s essays when I encountered them in The Believer and n+1. Those are reprinted here along with several I had not read before and they make up the best part of the book. Russell’s memoir sections add another spectacularly difficult Dad to the canon of American literature, but Russell, despite his relentless portrayal of his parent, still seems to be skirting the issues he wants to raise.
The book is enjoyable but it does not represent an further development in his writing beyond the magazine work. I also got the feeling that there is a "recovery story" in Russell's future.
The book is enjoyable but it does not represent an further development in his writing beyond the magazine work. I also got the feeling that there is a "recovery story" in Russell's future.
August 10, 2018
It took me maybe 4 attempts to read this book.
I get it. He's white trash who has seen some things and lived some life, and the format he chose of splicing in stories of his family life highlighted this white trash upbringing. Got it.
But I couldn't get over his rural colloquialisms with the occasional big thesaurus word thrown in. Okay, you went to college. Your combination writing style is hard to believe. Are you white trash or did you go to college, or are you educated white trash who simply can not write a story in a cohesive voice?
The story about Amish baseball is pretty good, though. The rest of the book I could leave.
I get it. He's white trash who has seen some things and lived some life, and the format he chose of splicing in stories of his family life highlighted this white trash upbringing. Got it.
But I couldn't get over his rural colloquialisms with the occasional big thesaurus word thrown in. Okay, you went to college. Your combination writing style is hard to believe. Are you white trash or did you go to college, or are you educated white trash who simply can not write a story in a cohesive voice?
The story about Amish baseball is pretty good, though. The rest of the book I could leave.
June 25, 2023
“Find me a man without an addiction. I don't think you can.
Whatever it might be that he's addicted to is incidental. It all comes down to the same thing: a means of fleeing yourself and plunging trance-like after transcendence. It's the fulfillment, adulterated or not, of a sincere desire. I want to give myself over, utterly.”
this book was so so so good. it did take me a while to finish, but i blame a summer slump on that. all the stories caught my attention, and i enjoyed reading them. thanks ava!
Whatever it might be that he's addicted to is incidental. It all comes down to the same thing: a means of fleeing yourself and plunging trance-like after transcendence. It's the fulfillment, adulterated or not, of a sincere desire. I want to give myself over, utterly.”
this book was so so so good. it did take me a while to finish, but i blame a summer slump on that. all the stories caught my attention, and i enjoyed reading them. thanks ava!
July 3, 2020
I picked this up from a Little Free Library because it had an essay about the Gathering of the Juggalos and I like reading about communities, but it turns out that Kent Russell is a condescending jerk who was more interested in repeatedly writing about how fat many Juggalos were than in developing any empathy or understanding. I’ve been to an ICP show and people are totally welcoming no matter what you look like and whether you’re a Juggalo or not, if you’re not a fucking asshole.
May 23, 2019
A lot of gonzo journalistic investigations of masculinity in America wrapped around a son's attempt to figure out his relationship with his ex-military hyper-vigilant dad.
Insane clown posse, hockey enforcers, people who get bit by snakes on purpose, gruesome special effects artists, Amish baseball players.
Brother of Karen Russell of swamplandia fame, which I'm now interested to read next.
Insane clown posse, hockey enforcers, people who get bit by snakes on purpose, gruesome special effects artists, Amish baseball players.
Brother of Karen Russell of swamplandia fame, which I'm now interested to read next.
May 5, 2021
I could not quite grasp which genre to which this book would belong. Halfway through I thought I had it because the story did get a bit more understandable. Still I could not wholeheartedly endorse the book due to the author's not (in my opinion) hitting on a real point. He writes entertainingly enough but all was still a bit blurry for me.
March 9, 2023
The title sort of hinted at the notion he felt he had something to prove, but once I started to read, yes, absolutely. There was a lot of, Look at the word I used here, look at that one, pretty impressive isn’t it? This did not make me want to read much of this, but it did incline me to remind my kids how much I care for them.
June 21, 2018
Unbelievable. The prose, the prose, the prose. The way the essays are threaded around a theme that becomes more apparent the longer you read on. Incredible work from a boundlessly curious writer.
Are Kent Russell and Spencer Hall the only good Florida Gators? I'm leaning yes.
Are Kent Russell and Spencer Hall the only good Florida Gators? I'm leaning yes.
September 30, 2020
My favorite story was American Juggalo. From a guy who allows venomous snakes to bite him to an old hockey player whose main mission seemed to be to inflict pain, theses stories also include the author's father on what it is to be a man.
March 12, 2023
a good collection of essays. a bit random but a window into a different (and more stereotypically American) kind of life. my faves were the snakes and venom, the movies and old school makeup, and Amish and baseball.
March 26, 2018
nobody talks like that, man
September 9, 2018
Very funny and sad book.
July 25, 2019
what a total blandfest
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