Tag: books

Roy Cohn: The devil at the heart of the American dream

If he’d lived, Roy Cohn would’ve been 100 years old next year, but he’s still very much alive in the American psyche.

Cohn is the thin red line that winds through America for much of the last century – from the execution of convicted spies the Rosenbergs to the dramas of McCarthyism, from the hedonism of the ‘70s, Studio 54 and Reaganism to the rise of one of his most eager students, Donald Trump.

Kai Bird, co-author of the superb Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” turns his gaze on Oppenheimer’s polar opposite with his fascinating new book, cowritten with Susan Goldmark, “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump.”

Cohn’s spectre has made a bit of a posthumous comeback in recent years, as his clear influence on Trump’s “never give in” style has become apparent, and their relationship was even given the big-budget Hollywood biopic treatment in the Oscar-nominated The Apprentice.

Roy Cohn was an awkward Jewish kid with an overbearing mother who worked his way into the top corridors of power with his sheer unrelenting drive to win at any cost. As a young attorney, he was just 23 years old when he played a pivotal role in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1953 for passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Cohn pushed hard for the still-shocking execution of the couple – the guilt of Ethel, a 37-year-old mother of two, remains particularly disputed decades later.

“I would have fucking pulled the switch if they’d have let me,” Cohn said years later.

The Rosenberg trial set the pace for Cohn’s career, as he moved from more liberal leanings to a conservative, pugnacious worldview, teaming up with Senator Joseph McCarthy as his chief counsel and horse whisperer during anti-communist witchhunts in the ‘50s, still just in his 20s as he launched a vendetta against anyone who was suspected of being communist, subversive, or gay.

The capping irony is that Cohn himself was gay, but deeply denied it despite his increasingly wild sex life into the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his subsequent death from AIDS at just 59 in 1986.

“American Scoundrel” shows us the making of an American monster, all swagger and bravado and zero morality. Through the darkest days of the 20th century, Cohn is there, hustling in the ears of politicians and crooks, refusing to give an inch or show compassion to anything or anyone. After McCarthyism, which stained him for the rest of his life, Cohn turned into a powerful lawyer for the mob and a variety of dubious characters, raking in the bucks and basking in his reputation as a man not to be crossed.

Bird and Goldmark show us how Cohn evolved, raised by a smothering mother whose own cousin called her “the nastiest person she ever met,” wheeling and dealing in business deals while still a teenager. Cohn was an ugly man made uglier by a botched surgery as a child to remove a small bump on his nose – his mother insisted he should be perfect – that left a grotesque red scar running down it for the rest of his life.

As he aged, Cohn took on a reptilian sheen, scorching himself with constant suntanning, his eyes becoming more hooded and piercing, the scars on his nose and from clumsy facelifts turning his visage into something Mephistophelean. His soul seemed to be coming out of his pores.

When he met a young Trump in the 1980s, who was seeking advice over a lawsuit accusing his housing properties of discriminating against Black renters, Cohn told him, “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court.” And that advice has echoed through America ever since.

One passage from “American Scoundrel” feels like it sums up the Cohn worldview – and the style of so many of his acolytes:

Roy looked out the window and angrily asked, “What time is it?”

Bob was frightened by Roy’s demeanor, but he replied, “Well, it’s nighttime, it’s dark.”

“No,” Roy said.

“I tell you it’s daytime, and I’ll prove to you it’s daytime. Now, go out and figure out how I did it.”

Roy Cohn has been dead for 40 years, but he’s still with us. As Bird and Goldmark point out in a new essay for The New York Times just this week, the sneering figure of Stephen Miller, Trump’s new chief of staff, bears a strong resemblance to Cohn in nearly every way.

“More closely than anyone else in Mr. Trump’s administration, he follows Mr. Cohn’s playbook of aggressive, unapologetic defiance,” they wrote.

Reading a biography about a damnable villain is always a strange experience. Bird does attempt to humanise Cohn a little bit – he was apparently very loyal to his friends, including a peculiar “beard” relationship with TV’s Barbara Walters – but ultimately, he was a man who fought the world day after day. I can’t say it’s a “fun” book, but it’s key to understanding the way America has evolved in the past 80 years, briskly told and much of it in Cohn’s own words – he was never shy of seeking publicity in interviews.

In the end, Cohn was disbarred for misconduct and only weeks later died a lonesome, painful death from AIDS, denying to the public he was gay or that he even had AIDS (he claimed it was liver cancer) until the end. Never apologise.

In Bird’s book, it’s reported that a journalist saw Trump at Cohn’s funeral, weeping.

I have some mild hope that last week’s midterms show a convulsive rejection in America of the Roy Cohns of the world, of the aversions to any kind of inner reflection, regret or apology.

But I’m also keenly aware that “American Scoundrel” shows us such tendencies have been part of the country for a very long time – long before Cohn’s rise and fall, of course. He simply magnified them for a new mass-media world.

Roy Cohn’s dark legacy haunts America to this day. And ghosts can be very, very hard to get rid of.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous portrait of Roy Cohn, 1981.

I still believe in the jackalope

You can take your Bigfoot and your wendigo and your Jersey Devil, I’ll stick with my jackalope. 

A jackalope, for those not in the know, is a tall, sleek jackrabbit, but one with a perkily impressive set of antlers, an all-American critter that leaps and bounds across the wide open plains of Wyoming and Nevada and elsewhere. 

They are rare, it’s true, but their unique evolutionary niche is a special one to many folks in America’s western states. 

Jackalope-ology is also a bit of a throwback to the days when conspiracy theories were, well, kind of fun, as opposed to a sleazy collective of nihilistic grifting and all mankind’s nastiest impulses. I miss silly conspiracies about aliens and sasquatches and Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. The internet’s kind of ruined that world for us. 

On my last visit to the US, I stumbled across a paperback of Michael P. Branch’s exceptionally deep dive into the long-eared weirdness of it all, On the Trail Of The Jackalope. I had no idea this book existed and it fills a hole in my soul I didn’t know was there.

Branch, a jackalope obsessive, heads out on a road trip across the western USA to interview jackalope makers, worshippers, myth spreaders and more, and in the process drafts a nifty little alternate history of the Wild West. 

America’s long-standing love for the cryptid – enjoyably explored in thorough detail in another groovy book, J.W. Ocker’s The United States of Cryptids, feels less toxic than many other obsessions are in these twisted times.

A jackalope won’t give you cancer, steal your retirement money or be co-opted for racist and sexist lies – it’s just a darned funny bunny with a big set o’ antlers. 

You will find jackalope heads mounted on walls throughout the American west, testament to a dying breed of beast, perhaps, or possibly just a really wacky souvenir.

Way out in South Dakota at the famous Wall Drugstore, an entire wall of faux jackalopes are mounted and available for purchase, as well as all kinds of kitschy jackalopiana – t-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses, posters, keychains, beer, you name it. (I wish now I still had my bumper sticker I bought there back in ’06.) 

Are they real? That depends on your point of view. 

It’s all exploded from a quirky obscurity to a bona-fide subculture, which Branch’s book very entertainingly dissects. Jackalopes became hipster fodder somewhere along the way, and Branch even takes part in a sold-out class of taxidermists in San Francisco all learning to make their very own jackalope. 

I think I first encountered the jackalope in cartoon form – a local cartoonist in the Northern California town where I grew up, the great RL Crabb, frequently drew a gangly anthropomorphic jackalope named Junior, who starred in his own seven-issue comic book series back in the 1980s. Somehow I stumbled across a copy of Tales of the Jackalope and its witty Americana satire (you’d better believe Bigfoot makes an appearance), and the jackalope always stuck in my head.  For a little while, I wasn’t sure if it was all a joke or not.

Then I realised that doesn’t matter. Branch’s hugely fun book takes a wild whopper of a folk tale and gives it another round of life. He even looks at the real-life inspiration for jackalope sightings – rabbits who were infected with a kind of papillomavirus that causes horny deformities growing out of their skulls. Those jackalopes aren’t so cute, to be honest, but a really interesting nugget of information in Branch’s book is about how the study of that virus has helped develop vital anti-cancer treatments for humans. 

The jackalope is my kind of great American myth – not one about swaggering superiority or harsh domination, but one about a spunky little battler who keeps carrying on despite the odds against them. They’re silly, but they also offer us a slight promise of mystery that might still be out there hopping across the western plains. 

The jackalope is a “trickster god,” Branch writes, bounding back and forth between real and imagined worlds. Throughout his travels, he keeps asking people why they love jackalopes.

“I’m always hoping they are real – that there’s something magical hidden around the corner,” Sarah of South Dakota tells Branch. “A unicorn or a centaur, probably not. But a jackalope? That’s something that could be real.” 

Jackalopes might not technically exist, I guess, but I still believe in them all the same. 

In defense of Mississippi, the place where I became a writer

When talking to people, it doesn’t take long before I get asked where I’m from. My thudding American accent, still firmly attached after nearly 20 years in New Zealand, gives it away.

“California,” I’ll usually say, which will typically bring up talk of Hollywood, skiing, surfing, Disneyland, or all of the above.

But I’m also from Mississippi, which often gets a very different reaction when I say that – a slight twist of the lip, widening of the eyes. Mississippi is a word which feels haunted, slippery with meaning. There’s no more evocative American state name, with all that entails. 

I visited Mississippi last month for the first time since 1999. It seemed much further from New Zealand than California where most of my family and friends live, and yet in the last year or two I’ve had a hankering to see those Southern skies again, to visit the friends and relatives still scattered around Mississippi, to get back in touch with a important chapter of my life that had started to seem so very distant. 

The roots of my family run deep there. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, in a quiet cemetery tucked away down shadowy side roads. 

I lived there myself from the ages of 18 to 25, from a freshman in college to a fumbling young working journalist. It’s a formative time in anyone’s life when you start to figure out who you’ll be. 

Oxford, Mississippi is where I became a writer, where I went from being one of those people who’d talk about being a writer to someone who actually got paid cash money for stringing words together. I was a performative oddball California kid dropped into the Deep South. 

At Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, I discovered more than the science fiction and fantasy that marked an awful lot of my reading through high school. My professors introduced me to everyone from James Baldwin to John Updike to Donna Tartt to Flannery O’Connor. I read widely, Southern lit and non-Southern lit. I wrote for a daily newspaper for the first time and I had my first paying journalism jobs there, and began avidly scribbling comic books and even a daily comic strip on the side. 

When I lived in Oxford in the 1990s I was at the end of eras, although I didn’t know it. Stark, raw Delta bluesmen like RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough would play to beer-addled frat boys, who didn’t know or care they were the last of their kind. At the local townie bar City Grocery, whiskey-soaked writing legends like Willie Morris, Larry Brown and Barry Hannah would hold court – they’re all gone now, memorialised by little bronze plaques on the bar. I took Hannah’s short story class at Ole Miss and churned out some pretty godawful tales before I realised journalism and comics were probably more my speed than great Southern literature. 

With my good old Oxford friends Bruce and Rebecca in Oxford, Mississippi, August 2026.

This year, I had a wonderful time returning catching up with old friends, mentors and co-workers, and despite the nearly 30 years that had passed in some ways it felt like yesterday that I had sat at the bars, that I’d browsed at Square Books and coffee’d up at Bottletree Bakery. Mississippi is a hell of a fun place, really.

But of course, it’s also full of shadows. 

Every place on Earth has a tragic past if you dig far enough, but Mississippi is unique in its stains and glories. I can think of nowhere else I’ve lived where the absolute worst and the shining best of a place are so deeply intertwined, where one seemingly cannot exist without the other. 

The horrors that were visited on the Black population in the 20th century still turn my stomach, the suppression, cruelty and casual dehumanisation. The story of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old boy tortured and murdered by white racists in 1955 for allegedly daring to whistle at a white woman – is as good as any to illustrate how horrible things could get.

My mother was just about the same age as Till and lived an hour or two away from where his blood was spilled. But she knew nothing about it at the time, until many years later when the story began to seep out into the wider culture. I often think about this, the two people of similar ages and totally, totally different worlds. The South endlessly romanticises itself, which can create both great stories and cover up hard truths. 

White Mississippian Wright Thompson, in The Barn, his masterful analysis of the Till killing, what led to it and the long suppression of it in history, tries to unpack the mysteries of an atrocity.

He writes that the more he looked at Till’s 1955 death, “the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view.” 

And yet, from that bloody soil has sprouted the seeds of change and art. Coming back to Mississippi, I felt loved by the Southern charm, the humidity and weedy kudzu (an invasive vine) carpeting everything, and the stories everywhere, the stories that inspired me and so many others. So much fine art and literature comes from there – William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, younger folk like Jonathan Miles and Kiese Laymon, music from Elvis to BB King that changed the world.

The best of its authors are constantly questioning Mississippi, instead of glorifying some lost cause endlessly. “Mississippi’s not an easy place to love,” Ralph Eubanks writes in Ever Is A Long Time, his excellent, deeply thoughtful memoir of growing up Black in small-town Mississippi and learning how the government actively spied on Black citizens. 

A place can have a terrible past and yet still have things to admire and love; in our everything-is-good-or-evil digital world that stokes perpetual outrage, it can be hard to explain a place that is full of troubles and pain, and still working hard to be better, and can be full of kindness, hospitality and talent. Mississippi is complicated. Isn’t everywhere?

“It is not hard to understand the fierce chauvinism of Mississippi patriots,” the late Stanley Booth wrote in his book of essays on Southern music, Rythm Oil. “To stay there, you would have to convince yourself you loved it.”

My time at Ole Miss in the 1990s was marked with endless wrestling over race in what we’d now call “culture wars” – over whether the anthem “Dixie” was racist, over the university’s white throwback plantation owner mascot Colonel Reb, over the Black editors at the Daily Mississippian and the waving of the Rebel Confederacy flag. It draws a fierce pride and at times defensiveness – lord knows I’ve had to defend Mississippi some over the years against the statements of people who’ve never been there. 

The Mississippi I visited last month felt like it was inching forward still with reconciling that past – the campus of Ole Miss was now dotted with prominent signs about the historic racial terror, and the looming town courthouse, as Southern an icon as it gets, now also features an account of the lynchings in Lafayette County. A monument to James Meredith, who became the first Black student at Ole Miss after bloody, fatal protests in 1962, now stands proudly beside the campus library.  It says “courage,” in bold letters.

Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and while that’s slipped into the realm of cliche, that’s still as Mississippi a thought as you can get. 

Despite what some folks running the country these days like to think, coming to grips honestly with the past doesn’t make you weaker. It takes, like the Meredith monument says, courage.

“Confronting its many imperfections, rather than hiding from them, makes it easier to love,” Eubanks writes. 

I’d much rather have a Mississippi that accepts and interrogates its past, rather than longs for imagined perfect glory days. I lived in Mississippi, loved a lot about it, grimaced at some things, and learned so very much about stories, writing and myself that I was happy to revisit for a few sultry August days and nights.

It is still not quite like anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without a little Mississippi in my blood. 

I’m an open book: My 10 favourite books of 2025 

In this AI-generated world we’re morphing into, you’ll have to pry my actual human-written books out of my cold, dead hands. Or at the very least send the Terminators to do the job. Anyway, reading remains a key joy in my life despite all our collective struggles, and I clocked up 109 books on my Good Reads accounts for the year (prose only – graphic novels and the like I don’t usually log there.) 

This year I really made an effort to read a lot of New Zealand books, as I try to embrace my second homeland a little more. And we’ve got quite a collection of excellent writers here, too!

Here in alphabetical order are my favourite 10 new books of 2025:

1985: A Novel by Dominic Hoey – Hoey’s snappy, scrappy fiction about the struggling underdogs of New Zealand society gets better with each book, and his tale of video-game obsessed Obi and his poverty-stricken family, with a delusional dad and ailing mum, is his best yet. A key portrait of an Aotearoa a world away from the shiny tourist destinations. 

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey – NZ writing superstar Chidgey delivers another cracking literary entertainer, this time a quasi-sci-fi tale about three strange young boys in a futuristic Britain trying to unravel the mystery of who they are. Chidgey makes smart fiction seem so easy. 

Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly by Craig Robertson – Beautifully assembled, this passion project about a pivotal New Zealand musician doesn’t excuse young punk Knox’s quirks and cruelty, while also delivering a vivid portrait of life in countercultural 1960s-1980s New Zealand and his fierce creative drive. It’s more than a book about a single artist, but also a time capsule of a whole era. 

Crumb: A Life by Dan Nadel – Crumb is what the kids call “problematic” now, and Nadel’s welcome warts-and-all biography doesn’t try to whitewash the sexism and offensiveness of some of his cartooning, while also showing us how he got that way. A great biography. 

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie – Wot’s this then, another book about the Beatles? But Leslie’s excellent tome excels by focusing forensically on the creative and human relationship between John and Paul, and in the process he finds yet another new way to explain the mystery of how we got the Beatles. 

A Marriage At Sea (also titled Maurice and Maralyn) by Sophie Elmhirst – A huge story of the day that’s mostly forgotten now (I sure didn’t know about it!), in 1973 British couple Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were rescued after a stunning 118 days at sea in the Pacific Ocean in a raft after their boat sank as they attempted to sail to New Zealand. Elmhirst’s eloquent book lays out the harrowing survival tale in intense detail, but also digs deeper to find the human heart behind the headlines. 

North Bound by Naomi Arnold – Journalist Naomi decided to walk the entire Te Araroa trail spanning the entire length of New Zealand, and in the process delivers a frequently hilarious, often moving picture of determination and stubbornness and the notion that no matter how far we travel in life we can never quite escape ourselves. A new classic of Kiwi nonfiction. 

This Year: 365 Songs Annotated by John Darnielle – I’m cheating, because I haven’t finished this yet, but it’s sublime – Mountain Goats frontman takes us on a tour of his songwriting career his exceptional lyrics, bundled together with personal essays reflecting on how he wrote them. Darnielle is a piercingly insightful, very funny and endlessly humane writer, and this is a cornucopia of his talents. Even if you’ve never heard a single Mountain Goats song, you’ll learn a lot about the art of writing here.

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe – I’ve been waiting for years for Cameron Crowe to tell his story, and while the man behind Jerry Maguire, Singles and Say Anything has fallen a bit fallow on the film front in recent years, his memoir of becoming a teenage rock journalist is everything I’d hoped for – an expansion and clarification of the film Almost Famous, and witty and wise look back at a kid who somehow ended up befriending legends like Bowie, the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin and following them around the world. 

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan – Literary lions can still roar. Legend McEwan at 77 writes another one of his clench-jawed, shocking morality plays that begins in the distant future of 2119 and pivots back to dissecting a tortured relationship between a famed poet and his wife in 2014. Its visions of an apocalyptic future are a rich metaphor for the very perilous state of our world today, but it’s also very much about the devils we all carry around within our secret selves as well. One of his best. 

The death of the mass market paperback, the people’s books

The mass market paperback is dying. Publishers Weekly makes it official, as distributors have pretty much ended those once-ubiquitous 4-by-7 inch-sized books sold around America and the world.

People who are buying books still are getting the larger ‘trade paperbacks’ or hardcovers but the budget-friendly wee paperback that used to sell by the millions is now, it seems, obsolete. 

They’ve been fading for a while, I guess – I honestly can’t recall the last new mass market paperback book I saw for sale here in New Zealand other than those cute little perennial Penguin classics, and the last few times I’ve been to the US those comforting little supermarket shelves of Stephen Kings and Lee Childs seem to have been shrinking to nothingness. 

Books themselves aren’t going anywhere, or so I keep telling myself and fervently hoping despite all the evidence humanity’s collective brains are dissolving into a stew of slop and influence. But I’ll miss those paperback stands at the supermarket or the drug store, just like I miss those spinning comic book racks I once lived for. 

Growing up, the plucky little mass market paperback was my gateway to the wider world of words, starting with the battered second-hand Peanuts and B.C. comic strip collections I’d pick up at the thrift shops. As a book-obsessed young geek with limited money, buying myself a book for a buck or 50 cents was heaven. 

I still recall my first time or two visiting a paperback exchange with my allowance burning a hole in my pocket – inhaling that rich odour of pleasant decay you get from sniffing a vintage paperback and its gradual breakdown of cellulose and lignin.

I’ve got nothing against trade paperbacks and hardbacks and the like. All books are great! But those mass market paperbacks felt more egalitarian, covering everything from literary bestsellers to glorious trash. Those small covers weren’t a very big canvas, but in its heyday the mass market paperback was America’s everyday art form, before we all started getting distracted by screens 24-7. Nothing beats a great paperback book cover.

Books that feel like they were made just for me like Paperbacks in Hell and the absolutely amazing pulp fiction histories like Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Cool Cats or Dangerous Visions And New Worlds celebrate all the weird little horror and sci-fi and crime paperbacks that filled up every spinner rack between Spokane and Miami for decades. Every chunky pocket-sized paperback was a passport to somewhere else. 

My first Stephen King reads were battered paperbacks handed down from my mom. I’ve still got Different Seasons, its cover barely hanging on, and can picture the thrilling little shocks and heartbreak his classic novellas “Apt Pupil,” “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body” broke open in me. Somehow, reading those King books as a teenager, I knew I’d have to make a living with words, even if I’d never be a Stephen King. 

I was first introduced to the irascible, unforgettable Harlan Ellison through books like Deathbird Stories, and even though that stark gorgeous red spine on the paperback has faded a lot over the years, I’ll never get rid of it, or part with the memories of the beautifully apocalyptic title story, which felt like a cosmic symphony cracking open to Young Nik’s brain.

Or Tom Robbins’ delightful Jitterbug Perfume, which was passed around my high school pals like contraband – we were years too late for Robbins’ peak sexy surreal hippie lit-god era, but Perfume and his other books still felt like the counter-culture to me, with his loopy prose wrapping in everything under the sun in gloriously excessive comic romps. 

I still remember exactly where I got many of the paperbacks – the collection of Flannery O’Connor novels I picked up during a summer in New York City at one of those outdoor book stands, the hefty Stephen King The Tommyknockers I picked up to read during a long road trip around Oregon and California with my dad toward the end of high school. 

So many others – the extremely battered “1984 anniversary edition” of George Orwell’s 1984 I read when I was 13 which turned me into a lifelong fan; the very first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, Hocus Pocus; the massive pre-internet compendium Book Of Lists which filled me with a Wikipedia’s worth of trivia and knowledge; Robert Asprin’s charmingly hokey “Myth Adventures” series, Donna Tartt’s achingly gorgeous The Secret History which felt like the literary novelisation of my wild intellectual college hopes and dreams. The most recent one on the shelves, Quentin Tarantino’s doggedly nostalgic novelisation of his movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was released in mass market paperback form just like all those hacked-out movie novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Before you could log on to stream or even pop in a VHS tape, the Star Wars novelisations gave us a way to get back into the story. I miss that truly interactive experience.

As the wife reminds me, I’ve got too many books, spread about the house in a variety of shelves that I’m constantly refining so I can fit the new books in without too many piles of loose books everywhere. But I’ve still got many of those mass market paperbacks that were building blocks to the book-brain, carried around the world the last 40 years or so. They won’t go anywhere while I’m around. 

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024: Free sample 5, the grand conclusion!

Here’s the final Clippings Mondays, as I promote my new book of collected journalism and scribblings all through March! I’d sure be obliged if you consider grabbing this hefty compendium of 30 years’ worth of journalism and heck, if you’ve got one, drop a review to help me go viral and become an influence. It’s now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

This one comes from a period of time when I wasn’t writing as much journalism and got lost in the labyrinthine mazes of management work. From the “Places” section of ‘Clippings,” I attempted to put down some words to capture one of the most remarkable holiday experiences I’ve ever had, and hopefully I got some of the feeling of what it was like to stand on top of a mountain with lava bouncing around your face!

Standing on the edge of a volcano

October 2014

As you climb up to the rim of a very active volcano, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like a human sacrifice in the making.

Vanuatu’s Mount Yasur is one of the scariest places I’ve ever been.

It’s one of the most accessible volcanos in the world, but it’s still not all that easy to get to Yasur. It’s located on one of Vanuatu’s southernmost islands, Tanna, meaning a jaunt on a small plane from the capital Port Vila and then another two to three hours of bumpy four-wheeling across jungle and ashy volcanic plains.

At 361m, Yasur towers over the low-lying Tanna plains. You see it long before you get there.

Many ni-Vanuatu live here in the shadow of the volcano – groups of teenagers idly walking in its vast shadow like they’re on a trip to the mall.

Climbing up some of New Zealand’s dormant or extinct volcanic cones, it’s easy to forget about the staggering power that they can have. Yasur won’t let you forget that for a moment, burbling and billowing like a bull chained.

The final walk up to the rim is humbling and eerie – you are able to basically get as close to the volcano as you want to, although nobody sane would venture past the rim edge around it. There are pretty much no safety precautions or ropes besides a sign saying “THINK SAFETY.”

It is impossible to capture in photos or even words really the experience of being up there.

The first thing that hits you is the sound, an endless chest-shaking booming and roaring.

My small group stood on the rim and watched the smoke rolling forth, punctuated by sudden and scary rolling booms and lava actually erupting out in “small” bursts. As darkness began to fall, the colour and mood of the volcano changed. Clouds of sulphuric smoke washed over us, the colour changed from a white to orangey glow out of the crater and we were favoured by a massive bang that filled the whole crater in front of us as we neared total darkness. We stood as night fell, on the edge of the infinite.

Tourists have been killed here by volcanic “bombs” of rock hurled into the air. These days close seismic monitoring keeps an eye on volcanic activities, with a scale of 0 (low activity) to 4 (run for your lives). Yasur was at Level 1 when I was there, and access to the crater is closed when it hits Level 2.

Watching the pretty scarlet rubies of molten rock tossed into the air like a Guy Fawkes’ fireworks show, it’s hard to imagine that a single piece of that red-hot debris would kill or cripple a person.

There was a bit of dark comedy in realising when darkness fell us that the half-dozen or so of us up there had no idea where the trail back to the ride in the parking lot was – despite flashlights, the trail wasn’t marked clearly enough to be that visible and it was very dark, with no light other than the volcano crater and a stray beam or two of light in the distance. We kind of gently ambled downwards (firmly away from the glowing crater, as that was the one direction we all knew not to go in), finally managing to find our main trail and the carpark again.

Think safety.

It was very easy to see how you could end up making a horrible mistake and getting lost for days up there. People have died at Yasur by making very bad choices.

There are few places where one can feel so small and so big at the same time than the lip of an active volcano on an island somewhere at the bottom of the world.

Read this piece of adventurous foolhardy behaviour and much more in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024

X marks the book: Bookmarks I have known 

I never really intended to start collecting bookmarks, but somehow I’ve accumulated quite a little stack of them over the years. After a while, you keep some things long enough, I guess they become sentimental by default.

So it is with bookmarks – for a long time, I’ve made a habit of grabbing a free bookmark if a book store offers them on the counter – and really, all the best bookstores do that, because what bibliophile can resist a nifty little souvenir to jam into their freshly opened tomes? 

From Alaska to New York to Oregon to Auckland to Australia, I’ve ended up with quite the burgeoning pile of bookmarks now, even though I know I may never use some of them for their intended purpose. 

But they keep me company – and remind me of book memories, which are some of the best kinds of memories to have.

I keep almost all the bookstores of my life in my mind and have written about them before. Whether it’s familiar neighbourhood haunts or world-famous icons, they stick in my mind: The nameless bookstore somewhere in Montana I stopped at during a cross-country trip where I could barely afford petrol, but of course I bought a few books. The cheap paperback exchange in Oakdale, California that kept me alive that 8 months or so I worked in the most boring town I’ve ever lived in. The cavernous, overstuffed and cobwebby Book Barn south of Christchurch or the hip oasis of City Lights in San Francisco.

Book stores I was just passing through like ones in Bandon, Oregon; Alice Springs, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand; Fairbanks, Alaska. If you visit a town and don’t try to check out the best local bookstore, are you even a tourist?

Sometimes I can still remember what I bought at them – I know I picked up a William Randolph Hearst biography at the Alaska one, 25 or so years ago, although I often cannot remember what I had for breakfast today. 

The bookmarks I have remind me of spots like immortal Powells Books in Portland Oregon, still probably the best book store on the planet. I have dreams about it to this day.

Quirky ones like a souvenir of a great Salvador Dali art show in Melbourne, or a gift from an appearance by the Dalai Lama in Auckland I somehow ended up at. 

Tokens of long gone stores I used to visit like Black and White Books in Reno or the fine art book speciality shop Parsons in Auckland or Jason Books in Auckland, the last one just shuttered in the last few months. 

They’re just flimsy scraps of paper, mostly, some getting battered enough that I should retire them into a drawer so they don’t crumble to bits entirely. 

But they’re part of my life in books, and that’s not a bad thing to keep hold of. 

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 3!

Hey, it’s your weekly reminder I’ve got a new book out! For the release of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, every Monday in March I’m spotlighting one of the more than 100 pieces by me gathered up in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

This one actually comes from right here on this here website back in the long-ago days of 2021. It’s a sample of the ‘Criticism’ section of the book which gathers up piles of pop culture ruminations I’ve done over the years. Inexplicably, this post about Yoko Ono remains one of the most popular I’ve ever done. I’d flatter myself it’s about the quality of my prose, but more likely because I put Yoko Ono and ‘sorry’ in the headline and it’s hitting some Google sweet spot. Sorry, Yoko haters, but this isn’t a piece about Yoko Ono being sorry she broke up the Beatles!

Why I’m sorry I ever laughed at Yoko Ono

Read it right here!

You’ll find this piece and far, far more collecting 30 years of journalism in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024. Order it today, baby needs a new pair of shoes!

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 2!

In celebration of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, each Monday in March I’m spotlighting one of the more than 100 pieces by me gathered up in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

I randomly divided this collection up by themes – Profiles, Places, Criticism and the like, and then there was a random selection of more goofy pieces I figured I’d just file under “humour.” This recollection of my very first job in journalism written while I was working at Lake Tahoe is, as best as I can recall, almost entirely true.

Scenes from the route

North Shore Truckee ACTION, September 2, 1998

I have edited newspapers and I have written for newspapers, but my first “real” job in this world was to deliver them.

I was a squirrelly, zit-faced and longhaired 13 going on 14, and I did it for about a year, delivering the Grass Valley Union from door to door in a square mile area several blocks from my home.

The Union is an afternoon paper, and so each day after school I would return home to find a bundle of Unions in our driveway, tightly bound. After an afternoon snack I would kneel busily on our dark garage’s concrete floor, taking my fifty or so papers and wrapping them with rubber bands. If it rained, you had to put them in orange plastic bags first.

The rubber bands sometimes snap if you rush things, and they twang off about the room spastically. Once one smacked me right in the cheek, raising a really embarrassing welt.

Your fingertips become black with ink as the headlines leave a bit of themselves on your skin. The day’s happenings are compressed into a small, dense cylinder of pulp that you lift and hurl repeatedly, trying to achieve a passable imitation of grace with each throw.

It was then, likely, that I began to stumble down the career path I follow tenaciously to this day. I was immersed in the smell of the hot paper, sometimes still steaming with the heat of the press, fascinated with the way the ink can cling to you.

I would ride down my route on my battered yellow bike, the newspaper bag carefully balanced on the handlebars, getting lighter with each block.

It was my first real job, and no one forgets the way that is – the strange freedom I felt riding my bike in the late afternoon on days that always seem cloudy in hindsight, the wind rustling the newspapers in my bag. I delivered news of President Reagan and “Peanuts” cartoons and what was on sale at Lucky’s, and I felt a part of some great system that pulsed beneath my 13- year-old world, a system I was just then beginning to perceive dimly.

I delivered newspapers and took inventory of my customers, the yards with plastic toys and broken bicycles in them, the houses with immaculate hedges and shrubbery whose porches I always aimed for with care.

The most difficult part of being a Union paperboy was collection time. At the end of each month I would go door to door on my route, getting $5.50 per customer per month to ensure they kept receiving their daily dose of news.

Portrait of a young hustler, mid-1980s

It was here you begin to encounter the world beyond lifting and hurling newspapers, and these days I’d dread somewhat. Demanding money from strangers was intimidating – looking briefly inside the anonymous homes I threw papers at, the couches where they read their Union each day.

I rapidly began to learn the language of excuses and rationale used so well in the grownup world.

“I paid you last month, boy, what are you tryin’ to pull?” one beefy guy who always wore too-small t-shirts would say to me every time I came by. And every time I would explain to him that he had to pay every month, he would mutter about what a rip-off it was, and he would finally pull five greasy dollars and fifty cents out of his pocket.

I learned how people wheel and deal, and I learned how people live without luck.

There was a cat woman. Every town has the cat woman, the twisted old lady who lives in a shack with a hundred stray cats. This woman’s house was crumbling and rotten, about to slide down an embankment onto the freeway overpass below. She had no teeth and no hair, and always wore a filthy Oakland A’s baseball cap. She would never have her $5.50 at the end of the month, and would gummily offer me excuses as ten of her bedraggled cats meowed and hissed around her legs. The cat lady had only one eye.

The cat woman would occasionally leave a folded dollar bill for me in her mailbox, toward paying off her slowly rising newspaper debt. I did not know what she did with her Union each day, if she read it or merely used it to line her floors inside what was surely one giant litter box.

And then there was “the towel lady,” as she would be enshrined forever in my pubescent memory. Each and every month when I would come by to get my $5.50, this highly attractive young lady, in her mid-twenties or so I’d imagine, would answer the door wearing a pink towel.

Just a pink towel.

You can imagine the fireworks this would set off in your typical 13- year-old paperboy.

Each month this woman would come to the door wearing just her towel, and she would give me my five-fifty and smile and I would melt into a giddy puddle of goo right on her doorstep.

I never could figure it out. If the towel lady wore just a towel once, I’d understand – she just got out of the shower or something, right? But each month, November or May or August, the towel lady would answer the door in her towel, and I would mature just a little bit faster.

The towel lady probably kept me doing the paper route a few months longer than I would have done – I was entering high school soon, and paper routes seemed too grade-school for my elitist brain then.

But I labored on with the route a few months into my freshman year of high school, always looking hopefully forward to my monthly visit to the towel lady.

The odds of gravity and physics were with me, I knew. That towel had to fall off eventually.

It never did, of course, except in my dreams.

This ink-stained confession and much more can be found in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 1!

Hey, did I tell you I made a book? But did I tell you ten times yet?

In celebration of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, each Monday throughout March I’ll spotlight one of the more than 100 essays in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

It was interesting combing through piles of yellowing clippings and old computer files and trying to figure out what to include in a survey of my so-called career. But this profile from when I worked in Oregon circa 2002-2006 was a definite. As a kid, I always wanted to be a zookeeper, until one day I realised that would involve a lot of blood and animal feces. But getting to shadow an actual wildlife park vet around for a day was pretty darned cool, and one of my favourite job assignments. 

The zebra veterinarian 

The Roseburg, Oregon News-Review, May 2002 

WINSTON, Oregon — The veterinarian is taking a close and careful look at his patient, like any good vet should. 

He checks his patient’s pulse rate and takes a blood sample. 

But this patient isn’t somebody’s pet beagle or kitten. Lying unconscious in the grass, he’s 700 pounds, nearly 6 feet long and covered in black stripes, and he requires eight full-grown adults to move him from place to place. 

Toz is a full-grown Chapman’s zebra, and today, he’s getting a house call from his doctor, veterinarian Modesto McClean. 

McClean, 43, has been the senior veterinarian at Winston’s Wildlife Safari since 1999, taking charge of the health of 600 animals — representing 90 different species — who call the park home. 

“You’re a specialist at being a generalist,” McClean frequently says about his job. 

And with good reason. 

In the course of a typical day, McClean’s duties cover the entire animal kingdom. Besides the zebra examination, on this morning he also has an African hedgehog with ringworm to deal with and a wolf recovering from foxtail weeds in its ear. Another day, he tends to a dove with a broken wing and supervises a tricky dental operation on a suffering cheetah, all before noon. 

“You’re always shifting gears,” McClean says. 

Toz is being moved soon from Winston to a new home, a private reserve near Portland. 

Animals come in and out of Wildlife Safari all the time. Some are swapped to zoos or other parks, while others, like Toz, are used for breeding purposes and exchanged around the country. Toz has fathered at least three zebra offspring at Wildlife Safari, but to avoid the genetic breeding pool becoming muddied, he’ll move on and let other, more genetically diverse zebra take on stud duties. 

“Spring and summer seem to be our busiest time (for moves),” said Deb Ryan, Wildlife Safari’s assistant curator. “Within the next month we’ll probably move 10 animals out, and probably move five to eight in.” 

Toz has to be examined for his health and for a lingering lame leg prior to the move. Bringing the zebra in for an examination isn’t as simple as putting him into a pet carrier. Most wild animals must be sedated before they can be safely examined or treated. 

“The toughest part of zoo medicine is the anesthesia,” McClean said. 

“Zebras are very aggressive,” Ryan added. A variety of drugs are used as tranquilizers, some of which are highly dangerous if not handled carefully. 

“A few drops more and I’m going to kill the animal,” McClean notes as he carefully mixes the solutions together into a dart. It takes a steady hand when dealing with the drugs. They can be administered with a dart pistol, a blowgun or an air gun, depending on the size of the animal and the thickness of their hide. 

A zebra has tough skin — “I say zebras are like horses on steroids,” said McClean — so a rifle is used to administer the knockout punch today. 

Every animal must be handled differently, McClean says. Originally from Southern California, his career has taken him to treat animals he might never have imagined he would. He’s worked with dolphins and chimpanzees, and even anesthetized a towering giraffe — “probably the hardest anesthesia in all of medicine,” he says. 

McClean first came to Wildlife Safari in 1995, where he trained under the previous park veterinarian. He was educated at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and Oklahoma State in veterinary medicine, and also served an internship in primate medicine and surgery at Yale University. 

He has also consulted in private veterinary practice for several years. McClean came back to Wildlife Safari in 1999 when he became the park’s senior veterinarian. 

Because the animals mostly roam free at Wildlife Safari, McClean and park keepers have become experts at what they call “binocular diagnosis,” where they carefully observe the animals to detect any sign of a possible medical problem. 

“I don’t have time to go every day to check every animal, so I rely on the keepers too,” McClean says. 

Toz the zebra has been moved out of the park’s general population into a small, half-acre enclosure to prepare him for his move. It also makes it easier for him to be drugged, because Wildlife Safari staff won’t have to chase him down. 

“Some people think hoof stock aren’t all that smart, but they know what a gun is,” McClean says as he watches Toz nervously gallop away from him. 

The doctor raises the rifle, takes careful aim at the retreating zebra, and fires the dart, which brings him to the ground in under five minutes. 

Once McClean is sure he’s fully unconscious, the staff gets to work, popping in an intravenous tube dispensing solution, as well as injections of atropine to keep his heart rate up. A monitor is hooked up to his tongue to check his vital functions, and an oxygen tube is placed in his nostrils. McClean checks out the zebra’s leg, which has been treated previously for weak tendons, and finds that his hoof is suffering some obstructions which he removes. 

While Toz is out, a pint of blood is also taken from him. The blood will be checked and then frozen, kept in store for possible transfusions. 

“This blood someday will save another small zebra,” McClean said. 

Any small checkups that can be done on the zebra are also taken care of. One park employee uses a tool belt set of pliers to scrape a buildup of tartar off the zebra’s large teeth, each the size of a man’s thumb. 

It takes eight park employees to transport the drugged Toz onto an open trailer for his move across the park. He is lifted onto a rubber mat, as one employee holds his IV and McClean monitors his vital signs. Toz is taken to a holding stall where he will live and be watched closely for a few weeks before his trip to Portland. 

The entire procedure, from the dart being fired to Toz waking up in his new quarters, has taken just under an hour. 

“I’m going to rate it as for a zebra, an excellent anesthesia,” McClean says. 

The rest of this delightful yarn and much more can be found in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024