some parts are hit or miss, the most interesting being the last story, the small boys' unit.

The last pages of the article called "HIPPIES" are one of the best pieces of writing in English, in my opinion.

This is a fantastic collection of journalistic essays and others rooted in memoir. 4.5567/5 stars. A few essays drag a bit, but Johnson’s two essays on Liberia really ravage you.

Odd book, but it covered a lot of ground I was interested in. His writing style is engaging, although sometimes, well, odd. He writes some of his vignettes in the first person and then some of them in the third person.

I thought about giving this book three stars, rather than four, but then realized that 1) I could not put this book down, 2) These stories need to be told and read.

So, thanks, Denis Johnson. I would love to have a coffee with you someday. I really enjoyed your book and advise others that it is well worth the time.

This off-beat travelogue is twenty times better than it has any right to be, and that's because Denis Johnson has an incredible eye and a voice to match. Ring-side seats.

psyched to read this after jesus' son... haven't picked up another johnson book since. i feel it was because i got a bit too much insight into the author (and was disappointed/uninterested)... im always saying, "don't confuse the art with the artist," so maybe i'll find my way back...

Terrific Writing—Amazing Reporting
The pieces in this collection are varied, some, dealing with his trips to Africa and Alaska, are tight, tense and full of action, others, set in the American west are slower, descriptive, quiet. The humanity of the reporter comes through in particular when he tells of his travels in West Africa and Somalia. The writer is just some white guy from Idaho, with no special powers or contacts, not unlike the people who he tends to rely upon to assist him in this travels. He cannot understand, his mind seems to freezes up in horror sometimes, at the state of the people that he sees. And this frozen disbelief, and the rapid switches between awful mistake and bizarre corniness come through in the writing with ease and beauty. Johnson’s road trip stories beat any U.S. road trip writing you can name – these are road trips through the Heart of Darkness, and out the other side.

A great travel writing book that encourages bravery and discovery.

When the author of JESUS' SON appeared in the NEW YORK TIMES Sunday magazine talking not about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but about the radically libertarian survivalist movement and its underground, one could almost hear the hip literary world’s collective gasp. Did Johnson’s newfound fascination with subjects like Ruby Ridge and Eric Paul Rudolph’s still successful evasion of the law in the Smoky Mountains mean that he was turning into an anti-big-government Republican? Or worse?

This new collection of Johnson’s nonfiction prose renders such questions moot by bringing into visceral clarity what has always pulsed at his work’s sacred heart: The poet, fiction writer, and essayist is still hell-bent—so to speak—on the vertical burn, on not only gettin’ right with God but gettin’ in his face. The desire for spiritual transcendence, to use a blander term, kick-started Johnson’s own past addiction and current searches, but also, unfortunately--and this certainly isn't Johnson's fault--produced a godawful, so to speak, plethora of cheap druggy and kissy-face ones facsimiles. If Jesus is to be found among us, whispers “Hippies,” one of the most restless, enraged, and brilliant essays here, he won’t be at a longhaired reunion, smoking dope, and saying, “Loving you!”





--adapted from the NASHVILLE SCENE/Village Voice Media, 13 September 2001

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3.5 with some moments of 5. So 4?

Johnson is a hell of a writer, but I think his fiction is stronger than his nonfiction.

Denis Johnson’s book Jesus’ Son was one of the first books that I read that made me really feel like there was somebody else out there that was like me: just as confused, messed up and in search of something that neither of us knew what. His book Seek, Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond continues to give me faith. Only this time it isn’t because we’re kindred souls wandering the country on an opiated binge. It’s because obviously I’m not the only one that sees the strangeness that life has to offer.