For those who haven't yet encountered his writing in magazines like the New Republic and the Believer, Kent Russell's I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son serves as a convenient introduction to his distinctive voice and his work exploring some of the more remote reaches of American popular culture.
Russell's vivid style is in full flower with his account of the Gathering of the Juggalos, a Woodstock-like music festival created by Psychopathic Records, the label founded by Insane Clown Posse. He has the same measured approach in a profile of Tim Friede. A truck plant worker from Fond du Lac, Wis., Friede has devoted his life to immunizing himself against the venom of the world's deadliest snakes, and Russell accords grudging respect to a man who "was born a freak of nature, being within it yet transcending it."
There are repeated interludes throughout the book recounting a visit Russell pays to his parents in California in the fall of 2013. Summoned there by his father, who hints that he may be dying, Russell writes essays that are part family history, part ill-matched buddy story. Above all, they're vulnerable dispatches negotiating the generational tensions between two men, one passing through late middle age and the other stumbling into early adulthood.
Whether it's hip-hop, venomous snakes or long-buried family memories, Kent Russell is the kind of writer whose sharp vision and lively prose have the power to seduce readers into paying attention to subjects they might never imagine were engaging. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer