Fabulous.

At times a memoir, at times gonzo, Seek records Johnson's adventures both within and without the borders of the United States. While war-torn Afghanistan, Liberia and Somalia provide the more dramatic settings, I found Johnson's travels through American fringe culture more compelling. Johnson meets Rainbow Children, Bikers for Jesus, and right-wing militia men on their own terms, and describes them with detail and with humor. Johnson is sympathetic towards indivuals and suspicious of organizations, and his personal search for meaning in a messed up a world provides an interesting parallels to his characters' wanderings.

Dipped back into this recently and remembered how great some of these essays are. "Hippies" is probably my favorite (having grown up around Rainbow Family folks), but many other things in here are also great and timely reading today.

when i first read this book, i was two chapters into it when i got confused, looked at the cover again, and realized that this was actually non-fiction. it sounded so insane, i was just assuming it was fiction. this man is a brilliant madman.

he did it

This book has crazy reporting from Denis Johnson where he goes to Liberia and meets with President Charles Taylor and his mob of teenage soldiers wearing wigs and wedding dresses and carrying rifles.

Denis Johnson is exactly the kind of man I want to drink Jack with in some smoke-filled bar on the wrong side of town at seven in the morning. Slightly discombobulated but awesome non-fiction.

At our best, we are loving, delusional students of this inhospitable, beautiful world. In Seek, The Man from Idaho shows us how being a student is the only way to survive.

Great non-fiction writing. Engrossing and engaging.

"The villagers sit close together, everyone touching someone else, steeped in a contentment that seems, at this moment, perpetual. It occurs to the writer that the secret way to happiness is in knowing a lot of dead people." pg 150

"Billeh's been lent a Kalashnikov, sand-blasted smooth and dull like those of the other two, each with a thirty-shot clip that may or may not be full, they refuse to say, and also Lion carries a sort of rocket, or grenade, that screws down onto the muzzle of his Kalashnikov and appears not to bear experimenting with. Lion produces from his waistband, for the writer's use, a 1917 model U.S. Army .45 caliber six-shooter, probably a Colt. It's got three forty-five automatic rounds in its cylinders, which are chambered for the long .45s, not the shorter automatic rounds. "One for each of you, if we're attacked, and one for me," the writer jokes-- they laugh like hell for twenty seconds, then shut down tight and inform him seriously that Muslims don't do suicide, it's banned by the Koran. He assures them the Bible's against it too, and everybody's comforted."pg 152

"When logic and utility fall from grace, the mystical authority of subtler concerns rises up like an intoxicating incense, and everything is done for reasons no one understands." pg 155

"Another night under a strange sky in a different realm. I listen to the reports on the shortwave of bombings, attacks, plagues, even witch-burnings (seventy elderly women burned in South Africa in the last ten months) and I feel I'm living in a world where such things are all there is... I've got a pocket New Testament, but I can't read much of it- because I'm living in the Bible's world right now, the world of cripples and monsters and desperate hope in a mad God, world of exile and impotence and the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. A world of miracles and deliverance, too. Add the invention of the Kalashnikov in 1947 into the mix, and life gets exciting." pg 157

"Some begin complaining about the Marines, and others point with pride to the water trucks and big guns stolen from the U.N., to the blown-up troop trucks upended and wheelless in the streets, and the corner, a monument now, where eighteen U.S. Rangers died fighting Somali militia. The U.N.- What did it accomplish? The tons of food and medicine, it's all forgotten. Only the police effort and the bossing stays fresh in the minds of Mogadishu. The outfit that saved, by it's own count, 150,000 here seems almost universally derided and resented." pg 161

"When the ill-timed efforts of nation-states to impose their idea of stability unbalances the tribal powers, the return to balance is violent." pg 161

"The journalist from America has decided to cling to the notion that out there, in the countryside he passed through to reach this crazy city, the people know what they're doing. Their leaders don't, and we don't. But they know. All this destruction is shaping tomorrow- a tomorrow without a lot of Idaho White Boy ideas in it." pg 169

"But the nation-state, the twentieth-century geopolitical entity held together by the government's monopoly on the use of force- it's finished. The Kalashnikov rifle and the Stinger missile, and the world-wide dissemination of these weapons during the proxy conflicts of the Cold War, have changed things as much as the invention of gunpowder did in the thirteenth century. A determined Third-World people can now hold out against the greatest powers- witness Vietnam- and even a loose coalition of determined clans or factions can drive away the strongest armies- witness Afghanistan- and now in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia it's been made plain that even factions at war with one another can, with their left hand, as it were, stalemate the U.N. in its efforts to stop the fighting among them." pg 170

4.5 stars

I am a huge Denis Johnson novels and short stories.

This book however is non-fiction and I found two essays that were quite extraordinary.

The first is entitled "Jungle Bells". It is a nine page story about his ill fated Boy Scout outing into the jungle while he lived in the Philippines as a boy. His father was with the U.S. State Department so Johnson lived in many places around the world. The story is hilarious, irreverent and nostalgic. I loved it immensely, it is perfect.

The second one is lengthy at nearly a hundred pages and it's entitled "The Small Boys' Unit". It is a much more serious story and in line with some of the fictional works he has set in Africa. In this real life story Johnson was hired by the New Yorker to interview Charles Taylor in the Ivory Coast. Charles Taylor was a ruthless warlord from the Congo who was at the time invading neighboring countries and slaughtering many people. He could do this because he had thousands of child soldiers in his employ. Johnson was arrested many times trying to get into and out of the Ivory Coast, a war zone. He was threatened with death many times and was terrified he would die for most all of the assignment. I won't spoil the plot but this is easily one of the best stories on what it is like to travel through a war zone in Africa. Hint: You're not in Kansas anymore Dorothy.

The other essays in the collection are good but these two are in a class by themselves for different reasons. I will remember them for a very long time because of the descriptive writing. It was like I was there with a gun pointed to my head. It amazes me how versatile Johnson was and how his skills were not just limited to fiction.

Great essays.