Named A Best Book of 2011 by the New York Times, Time Magazine,
the Boston Globe and Entertainment Weekly
A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural
landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning
young star of the literary nonfiction world.
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour
of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture.
Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the
wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us--with a laidback,
erudite Southern charm that's all his own--how we really (no, really)
live now.
In his native Kentucky, Sullivan introduces us to Constantine
Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century polymath genius who concocted a dense,
fantastical prehistory of the New World. Back in modern times, Sullivan
takes us to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet
the alumni and straggling refugees of MTV's Real World, who've
generated their own self-perpetuating economy of minor celebrity; and
all across the South on the trail of the blues. He takes us to Indiana
to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose and
then to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina--and back again as its
residents confront the BP oil spill.
Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that
we've never heard told this way. It's like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors
tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways we've never imagined to be
true. Of course we don't know whether to laugh or cry when faced with
this reflection--it's our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the
power of Sullivan's work.
