Customer Reviews

American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The beginning of this book sucked me right in. Grant, at the time a recent escapee of dreary London life, tells of his first awestruck days in the American West. As a lifelong resident of the West, I loved hearing the author's outsider appreciation for this land.

Grant's tales kept me up late into the nights, unwilling to get off the road with him. His amazing command of language makes the stories come to life in the most vibrant possible way. I particularly like the way he weaves American history in with his travels, and includes fascinating characters, historical and contemporary. There's also a love story with interesting twists.

Have a seat on the passenger's side, roll down the window, and enjoy the ride. I sure did.

I picked this book up at a Waterstone's in Sheffield, under its U.K. title of Ghost Riders, and it brought me back to my hitch-hiking days in America. Grant, a Brit., gets "travel fever" and lights out on the same open road that Whitman, Twain, Jack London, Steinbeck, Kerouac, and scores of others celebrate in American lit. and popular culture. Grant gives us an up-dated version of what the American open road is all about c. 1990 to 2003, with truckers, Native Americans, Vietnam Vets, the utopian Rainbow Family, the Elephant-like migrations of the SUV crowd and all the nameless, homeless, motel drifters and doorway leaners that we usually pass by in a blaze of chrome and a tinkle of "Route 66." Grant gives these people names and shows a bit of their desperation as well as their triumph in living a life of freedom in the post-modern USA. Grant also gives us hints of his own unhappy life and how all the loose ends are finally tied together by the return of his roving lady love. For anyone who has spent a day with their thumb out and a night camped under the desert stars, this book will be a reminder, and for those who haven't, this book might tempt them to give it a shot. This was a great read. Not as light as it first appeared, especially in the section on the history of the Native Americans, America's first nomads.

American Nomads was part of my summer reading list, a little lighter reading than my usual fare I thought. While Grant's book delivered as an enjoyable and swift read that was not too heavy, it also surprised me with its grasp of Western history and valuable insights.
Richard Grant is a Brit with an inclination to ramble. He fell in love with the wide-open spaces and endless road of the American West, and began a life of rambling all over the West at will. When he ran out of money, he returned to England and sold articles about his adventures until he raise another stake to come back and repeat the process. This book, his first, is the logical outcome of that process.
Grant artfully blends his own adventures on the road with historical examples illustrating the nomadic instinct that the open spaces of the West seem to draw out from those who live there. His chapters on conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, mountain man Joe Walker, and the Comanche tribe are particularly well researched and written. (His writing on the conquistador has inspired me to read Cabeza de Vaca's own Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America.)These subjects are well chosen, both as dynamic interesting stories, and for their instructiveness to Grant's theme.
Along side of these historical set-pieces, Grant tells of his own adventures on the road with psychotic hitchhikers, old school hobos, the drunken dregs of the Rainbow family, and methed-out crazy rodeo bull riders, among others. He ponders on how so many of the nomads that he meets in the West tend to be societies walking wounded , and notes the hardships and misunderstandings of being a nomad in a largely sedentary culture. But this is no whining treatise. Grant's joy in and love for a wandering life in the beautiful empty spaces of the West is palpable, and if you feel any inclination in that direction, possibly contagious.
If you love road books and well-done history, consider American Nomads a must read.

Theo Logos

The subtitle really gives you an idea about the subjects covered in this book. The author talks about all kinds of nomadic people from colonial explorers to Dead Heads, old Indian tribes to their modern descendants, Cowboys, serial hitchhikers, pioneers, and RVers. The book is basically a series of unrelated stories, tied together by the fact that they all deal with nomads.

Some sections start to drag a little bit. Even if some parts of it are a little immature, as one reviewer pointed out, (Drunken rodeo cowboys running out of a convenience store with a twelve pack, jumping through a car window and speeding off, for example), it still held my interest. I thought it was interesting that this is all non-fiction-- there actually are people who live on the road for their whole lives.

Throughout the book, there are parts that are more than just observation of how things are. The author gives background information, both historical and character. He does a little bit of analysis at times. He gives a lot of commentary, both his own and that of the people he meets, about the viewpoint nomads have.

This book can also serve as a launching point for further reading. I've read Cabeza de Vaca's book about his travels in the Southwest, and I'm planning on eventually buying the biography of Joe Walker, the unsung mountain man/fur trader/explorer extraordinaire. Point is, there's a good bibliography if you wanted to go deeper into some of the characters in this book.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (the hobo, explorer, minimalist, hit the road and don't look back kind of thing, that is), I'd really reccomend this book. I haven't even had it for a year yet, and I've read it at least four or five times (partially because I'm too cheap to buy a new book, but mostly because I just think it so dang interesting).

Inspired by Kerouac et al, and their tales of the open road, Richard Grant left rain-blighted London in the mid-eighties to travel around the Ameican west. In American Nomads he describes his fellow travellers; hoboes, retirees in winnebagos, the rainbow tribe, as well as the travellers who preceeded them; the cowboys, mountain men, and conquistadors. While never failing to tell a good tale he comes to examine his own restlessness, and the restlessness at the core of the American pysche. Part-travelogue, part-history, Grant's book reads like an adventure.

Richard Grant is an English journalist who, unable to handle English winters, moved to the American Southwest in the mid-1980s and for 15 years traveled around, rarely spending more than a few weeks in one place. For Grant, the vast open spaces of the West were an invitation to roam, and he's encountered many sorts of people who came to live on the road. Some of these men -- and they are nearly always men -- are described in AMERICAN NOMADS (released as GHOST RIDERS in the UK): truck drivers, drifters, hippies, rodeo cowboys, train hoppers and retirees in RVs. Grant also looks back at earlier nomadic traditions in the US, from Spanish conquistadors to fur trappers and cowboys.

This book takes a long time to find its footing. The initial chapters are rambling, almost stream of consciousness in places. I almost gave up on it. However, the second half of the book is more solid and the author's experiences with various subcultures are entertaining.

I found two aspects particularly memorable. First, Grant discusses in some detail the relationship between nomads and women. Many remain single into old age, unable to find a girlfriend who wants to be on the move. I initially assumed this was due to a female nesting instinct, but Grant makes a strong case that these are only modern cultural values: among nomadic tribes, it is often the women who keep the men on the move.

Second, there is also a very interesting description of a North American Rainbow Gathering. I had known that, unlike Rainbow Gatherings abroad, the NA event allows alcohol in a camp separate from the main gathering. What I didn't know is that "A-Camp" draws many drifters in and out of jail, and it's marked by constant brawls and round-the-clock drunkenness.

If you are interested in nomadic subcultures, I think Grant's book will prove interesting and informative. It's a pity that the first hundred pages are a bit of a slog.

This was a fascinating, wonderful book. I learned so much about the people who live on the road, folks most of us don't know exist. Grants explores all kinds of different groups, from hippies to cowboys to rail riders to tramps. He even throws in the RV senior citizen crowd (though they don't seem to fit in, even though they fit the definition; I guess he felt he couldn't overlook them, but I would have rather he did). His history of past American nomads was fascinating. There are just so many elements he covers in this book, as well as all the issues these nomads face (e.g. how do you deal with having no woman in your life?).

I disagree with another reviewer who thought Grant was using the book as a way to brag about his own life. The bits about his own life are understated, if anything. And the research he's done, the groups of people he's hung out with, is impressive. I knew nothing about the Rainbow Gathering, so this was very interesting. And the mindset of some road tramps--where they don't want to accumulate money, so they give it away when they come upon a large amount--was very illuminating.

In all, I thought he covered this topic very well, showed nomadism from a variety of perspectives and delved deeply into many of the issues surrounding it.

I finished my First Book of the New Year. This book I picked up by accident, as it was on sale for one dollar at the library. American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers and Bullriders. The author is a Brit (Richard Grant) who has discovered the beauty and wonders of the American Southwest. This tome came out in 2004, but the book is in no way dated because of that.

This was the author's first effort and it was enough of a success that he has gone on to write two other travel books. His books take effort because they are all semi-autobiographical/journalistic pieces that require a certain amount of endeavor. In this one, he travels with a myriad of American Nomads.

This is a fun book to read but didn't resonate with me. The people that he profiles I didn't find particularly attractive. I can interview the same sorts of folks by just going to my job as a psychiatric RN. The historical squetches are good, especially the segment on Joe Walker, who took a trip across the US in 1833.

One of the more comical elements of the book is when the author describes to a European audience why one of his protagonists couldn't get a $30,000 surgery. Europeans have no clue as to just how inegalitarian our health care system is.

Richard Grant lived in Tucson and you can see, towards the end, just how much he borrows from Ed Abbey (non-cited). He even takes a hike to one of the same desert Tinajas (watering holes) that Abbey visited in one of his essays. In this passage he states of Ed Abbey: "There have been some valiant attempts, Ed Abbey on the American Southwest...---but the literature of deserts is essentially a failure". Rubbish! To countermand this ridiculous comment, all I need do is refer the reader to Abbey's classic "Desert Solitaire".

Edward Abbbey doesn't make it into Grant's "Selected Bibliography". Neither does Joseph Wood Krutch. This is nearly unforgivable in a book about the American Southwest.

An excellent read about wayfarers, wanderers, drifters, travelers and others who either choose the nomadic way of life for one reason or another, or have no other choice.

Richard Grant's perspective into the non-sedentary life is a charismatic study into the scholarship of nomadism.
Traveling in the footsteps of all whom he observes, Grant begins with Cabeza de Vaca's journey across the southern states in 1530, later tracks Coronado's search for riches, then trails mountain men and Indians all the way through modern times with the Rainbow Family, rodeo cowboys, hobos, train tramps and finally the "nomadic elderly" who travel in their RV's.

The author, in his witty, enthusiastic style of writing, probes the reasons for restless feet, sort of a psychological study if you will, from the past to present. For some, being stranded in the same place for too long divorces oneself from oneself.

An entertaining, educational read with a spicy flavor of prose.

This book was not written in the 'horror' genre but reads that way because of the author's inclusion of uninteresting information about himself, while regurgitating half baked, uninsightful and occasionally downright offensive 'analysis' under the guise of 'immersion journalism' (quite a stretch). At the end, when the author tacks on the irrelevant fact that he has found the freedom to wander while being committed to some poor woman named Gale; they are going to marry, it's as if he thinks this is the happy ending the reader craves, that Gale won her gypsy over, that she bagged the 'prize' (the author) and they are going to live happily ever after... It horrified me- as the hapless audience- and for her but I don't think I was supposed to react that way.

Warning readers; this book not journalism. It's not really a book. The author pretends that while he ties his wanderlust to the long tradition of wandering in the American West that he is participating. In reality this book is more like a journal that aspires to intellectualize about the tension between nomadic and sedentary cultures, but due to the lack of insight and excessive mundane details about the author, fails. The author mistakenly assumes he is interesting to the reader but unfortunately, isn't. The skeletal bibliography tries to lend legitimacy to the text but the book still reads like a diary, sadly, the diary of a guy you wouldn't want to meet or drink beers with.

An example of Grant's lack of legitimate analysis is how the author passes along the conventional justification of European imperialism by ascribing military supremacy of the Europeans in North & South America to European technology. (p. 80.). It's hard to imagine over 90% of the populations in North and South America wiped out by disease, but disease is a more probable explanation that the author later acknowledges. The author has researched the subject of nomads- many of the details he reports are interesting. But they are nuggets far and few between hidden by minutiae, details about Grant's dull wanderings. Grant routinely refers to women through out as whores- not in quotations, but to mean prostitutes. His explanation of why women don't live on the road in the same numbers as men is that women are focused on raising children. I suspect the epidemic danger of sexual violence against women might be a better reason. Like so much of this 'book' the detail about the 5 cowboys and the inflatable doll result in the reader wishing they didn't know, much the same way we feel when we read details about the tortured love between the author and Gale.

Reading this book was like being stuck on a road trip with someone you thought was fun and smart and interesting, but as the journey progresses you begin to become first annoyed by Grant, then more and more until you just wants to arrive at the destination to get away from the boor. A much better read on the subject of wandering is Paul Schneider's Brutal Journey.