Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales
By Jake Halpern
3.5/5
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About this ebook
As a young reporter, Jake Halpern became obsessed with stories about "some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave." His fellow reporters joked with him and nicknamed him the Bad Homes Correspondent. But the more he learned about these people, the more he was drawn to them. Braving Home is Halpern’s irresistible portrait of these hometowns and his friendships with their most loyal residents.
In North Carolina, Halpern meets a retired mill worker who single-handedly manned his hometown in the wake of a devastating flood. In Alaska, he visits a lone snowbound high-rise at the foot of a glacier. At the base of a Hawaiian volcano, he stays with a hermit whose house was surrounded by molten lava. Among the glitterati of Malibu, a longtime "hillbilly" teaches him the traditions of firefighting. And on a barrier island off the coast of Louisiana, a legendary storm rider tells of surviving hurricanes—even if it means tying one's hair to a tree. Throughout his journey, Halpern explores the value of rootedness in an age when American society is more mobile than ever.
Jake Halpern
Jake Halpern is a journalist and author born in 1975. His book, Braving Home was a main selection for the Book of the Month Club by Bill Bryson and was a Library Journal Book of the Year. He is a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and This American Life. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, The New Republic, Slate, Smithsonian, Entertainment Weekly, Outside, New York Magazine, and other publications. He is a fellow of Morse College at Yale University, where he teaches a class on writing.
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Reviews for Braving Home
34 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5first line (of the introduction): "Every journalist has a niche -- it's inevitable -- and I was just a few days into my career when I stumbled upon mine."chapters: The Underwater Town: Princeville, North carolina / Tower of the Arctic: Whittier, Alaska / The Lava-Side Inn: Royal Gardens Subdivision, Hawaii / Canyon of the Firefighting Hillbillies: Malibu, California / Island of the Storm Riders: Grand Isle, LouisianaHalpern's book deals with some nice places to visit and the rare few persons who actually would want to live there, thank you very much...regardless of periodic and/or unpredictable ravages of water, snow, lava, fire, wind or what have you. It was interesting to read not only the descriptions of these sometimes isolated and often perilous places, but also the mini-biographies of individuals who choose to keep homes in them...in spite of (or for some, perhaps, because of) the isolation and danger.