Product Description

For ten years Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to discover what motivates them, why they believe the things they believe, and to find out what has happened to them since he last saw them. Along the way Louis thinks about what drives him to spend so much time among weird people, and considers whether he's learned anything about himself in the course of ten years working with them. Has he manipulated the people he's interviewed, or have they manipulated him? From his Las Vegas base, Louis revisits the assorted dreamers and outlaws who have been his TV feeding ground. Attempting to understand a little about himself and the workings of his own mind, Louis considers questions such as: What is the difference between pathology and 'normal' weirdness? Is there something particularly weird about Americans? What does it mean to be weird, or 'to be yourself'? And do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5184 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Times
'The original guru of American psychosis.'

About the Author

Louis Theroux went to America after graduating from Oxford University, where he wrote for satirical magazine Spy. After working on Michael Moore's 'TV Nation', Louis hosted his own show, 'Weird Weekends' for the BBC. He followed this with the hugely popular series 'Louis meets...' in which he spent time with, amongst others, Jimmy Savile, Neil and Christine Hamilton, and Chris Eubank. This is Louis' first book.

Excerpted from The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
EXCERPTS FROM PROLOGUE

We drove up a rough driveway, through a pine forest, past a sign saying ‘Whites Only’, into a clearing with a church and a guard tower and scattered mobile homes. The walls of the pastor’s office were lined with racist leaflets in metal holders. Cold and cluttered, it was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization, albeit one dedicated to the eradication of world Jewry. A pair of German shepherds called Hans and Fritz prowled around. There was a stack of flyers with Adolf Hitler wearing a Santa Claus hat.
Butler wanted a moment to open the morning mail, so Jerry offered to take me on a tour of the rest of the compound. Icicles hung from the eaves. A sign said, ‘God has a plan for homosexuals. AIDS is the beginning.’ The church itself was a perfect combination of mildness and menace, like a village chapel, with pews and a piano and stained glass, but with swastikas on the altar and the wall. ‘There’s no armed guards or anything,’ Jerry said, as though I should be able to see for myself how normal this all was. ‘Anybody who’s white is welcome.’
We went up a ladder into the guard tower, our feet clomping on the wooden boards. And there, as we stood looking out on miles of white wilderness, me feeling as though I was at the far end of the earth, a strange moral antipodes where Hitler stood in for Father Christmas and the halls were decked with swastikas, Jerry announced his great fondness for the TV programme, Are You Being Served?. This struck me as surprising on many levels – that an American neo-Nazi should have heard of a relatively obscure British sitcom from the seventies, that he should have enjoyed its broad sexual innuendo-based comedy, that he should have thought it important enough to mention at just that moment, in the Aryan Nations’ guard tower, on the heels of a particularly nasty racist rant.
For a few minutes, we talked about some of the characters. Jerry mentioned liking Mrs Slocombe, the bawdy old saleswoman in the lingerie department who made frequent references to her pussy. I asked him what he thought of Mr. Humphries, an effeminate sales assistant whose catchphrase ‘I’m free’ relied for its humour on the implication that he might be available for gay sex. Perhaps sensing this didn’t sit well with the official Aryan Nations policy on homosexuality, Jerry looked confused for a moment, then said he thought he was ‘disgusting’. In a playful mood, I asked Jerry to say Mr. Humphries’ catchphrase, and the conversation ended where it started, with Jerry saying, ‘But I’m not free! Because this country’s in bondage to the Jews!’……

One morning in April, I packed my last few things into the loft as a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan, such as it was, was to buy a second-hand car in Las Vegas, and work outwards from there; and it was several hours later, somewhere up above the American Mid-West, that two thoughts formed in my mind. The first had to do with the nature of weirdness. I realized that the main quality uniting my subjects, be they porn performers, neo-Nazis, or UFO believers, was their alienness to me specifically; and that my long years of interest in their beliefs was evidence that I – in however small a way – must share those beliefs. I wondered whether taken together the weird mores of the people I’d been covering all these years might represent a negative version of myself – a shadowmap of my own most secret nature.
The second thought was about the Weirdness Map I’d made in London. In my rush to get the last things into storage, I’d left it tacked up on the wall of my study; and I imagined it there, the sole item left in that empty house, a rendering in miniature of the landscape I was flying into…

Customer Reviews

Funny, light, educational, eye-opening
This is a really entertaining book, actually very funny at times - the bit with the alien medium was hilarious.
Theroux writes well - in a light and effortless to read style.
While it isn't too serious, he does pause to muse on the nature of weirdness, the origins of abnormal beliefs and behaviours in his subjects, and his own motivations for covering them. This is done without pretentious psychobabble.
The people covered are really fascinating and Theroux's interactions with them, as viewers of his TV series will know, are always revealing and amusing.

I really recommend this book.

Excellent debut
The word 'debut' seems a little weird for Louis, after all, most of the people who pick up this book will be long familiar with Louis and his collection of mad hatters from across the pond. Settling down with Louis' journey feels like rekindling some long lost friendships. I was most interested to catch up with Hayley, who I am sure had a bit of a thing for Louis - who wouldn't? Not even Christine Hamilton was impervious. Louis writes as he talks: charming, self efacing and respectful of his interviewees despite them having some horrific views. Ah...with the exception of Marshall Sylver who was a bit of a scumbag anyway. More power to you Louis and don't let anyone call you a poor man's Jon Ronson.

A funny and fascinating read!
I'm a bit of a fan of Louis Theroux's TV documentaries, but I came to this book not sure what to expect. Was it a travel book, a study in weirdness, a confessional, quirky, serious? But I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how quickly I ploughed through it.
The title is a bit mis-leading - "travels through American sub-cultures" - as this isn't really a travel book but a study of ten characters who Louis has met over the course of his journalism.
Louis moves to America and spends almost a year on a kind of road trip seeking out his favourite "weird" subjects. A porn performer, an alien-hunter, a pimp(!), Ike Turner and some scarey racist neo-nazis to name just a few. The chapter I found most fascinating was one about a woman called April. She's a neo-nazi and has two young blonde twins who she trains to sing nazi songs.
Somehow the humanity of even the most reprehensible of these people shines through. And Louis obviously has quite a close, affectionate bond with a lot of these people.
I recommend this to anyone who wants to figure out what compels people to believe outlandish things or to choose bizarre modes of life. Keep an open mind, and you wil love this book as i did!
Am I the first person to read this??? BUY IT!