Customer Reviews

'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

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

 

 

I brought this book with me on a long car trip and found it ideal reading, and very interesting and well-written. The author hitchhikes (mostly) across the U.S.A. after doing same some 20 years ago in his hippie days. He has some anxiety but finds his fears overblown. (Truthfully, this kind of book really, really, really makes one want to chuck everything, the house, the mate, the kids, the job, and just hit the open road. I mean this.) He meets kind and interesting people, too. I would compare this book to the writings of Bill Bryson, though without Bryson's humor. I only wish the book was longer!

Tim Brookes embarks on a hitchiking odyssey across the United States, and his varied and colorful experiences result in much introspection on himself and America.

There are some elements to the circumstances that limit our ability to immerse ourselves in his experience, but it stands as an interesting portrait of the US.

Brookes is at his best when he is introducing us to some random Samaritan; we meet dozens of characters and they are all interesting without embellishment. For this, I credit Brookes' ability to find the human story that makes each individual someone who merits out feelings and car. The quirky jobs, personalities, and circumstances of each teach us about the odd tapestry that makes up our country.

We also get to see some interesting places through a drifter's eyes, and Brookes displays a capacity to find the interesting details about a place and relate them to us in an entertaining manner.

That credit being given, this isn't one of my favorite books of this type, for several reasons. For one, Brookes is too self-aware to give us information about himself without it being wrapped in layers of filtration. He attempts to give us an honest picture of himself, but his overthought self-analysis just makes that impossible. And unfortunately ,he engages in self-analysis fairly often, and every time he does the book lags.

There's also the fact that Brookes embarked on this adventure specifically for the purpose of chronicling it, and this takes away from the authentic experience that Brookes is trying to have. Most hitchhikers have a purpose-- they are going somewhere, or they are running away from something, or both. They have limited resources that prevent them from taking a more conventional means of travel. They tend to lack the sophistication that Brookes does.

For Brookes, the purpose is the journey itself. At any time, he can pull the plug or access financial resources to solve an emergency. He also has colleagues, a clean rap sheet, and people skills that empower him in a way that the average drifter could only dream of. In short, Brookes is performing with a net, and it does take away from the thrill of the experience.

As a result, some of the sequences have a flavor reminiscent of a reality television show.

These critcisms aside, this is a book worth reading. It's nice to see that, once again, the idea of hitchiking as a necessarily dangerous activity has been debunked.

I thought this book was about a hitchhiking experience, but was suprised to find the author taking buses or riding with his photographer from New York City into PA, then from Ohio well into Wyoming. I found his writing style to be rambling and uninteresting, and was unable to keep reading after 100 pages or so. Had he truly hitchhiked, and kept to stories about hitchhiking, he probably would have written a great book.

I did enjoy many parts of this account of the author's adventures hitchhiking (and driving with his photographer) across the U.S. I have a few criticisms though: 1 -- he spends chapters talking about the great photos the photographer is supposedly taking, but the photo section only has a measly 13! What happened to all the photos????? 2 -- there are many grammatical and typographical mistakes. In fact, the reader before me must have been bothered because he/she circled all of them. 3 -- after a while, it is easy to lose interest in his account. I'm not trying to nitpick, as I did like the author's dry wit and detailed recounting of American cities and sights. However, this book is definitely not as interesting as many other travel/adventure books I've read. It doesn't try to be pretentious or draw grand conclusions about life (thank goodness) which makes it more palatable, but it's still not a great travel book. The prose kind of dries up in the second half.

To summarise, an entertaining read over about 2 weeks worth of pre-sleep reading. As a fan of road-trip-esque books, I was looking forward to this jaunt around the country. Brooks has an entertaining style of writing that, for the most part, was clear and understandable. His research and fact-finding is a little ropey, naming Keystone, Wyoming as a chapter when in fact Keystone is in South Dakota for example.

Sure he didn't exactl hitch all the way but give the guy credit, he sure did hitch a lot of the way. If you can get past the errors, you'll be left with an enjoyable read.

I love this sort of light reading. I just finished the book in 2010 and I found it a satisfying read. It is true the author did "fudge" a bit when he claimed to hitchhike across America. He did hitchhike, but not all the way. But he politely asks us to forgive him and if you have enjoyed his accounts, it isn't a hard thing to do. A word of caution, do not pick up this book expecting to be impressed or awed. A simple nod of the head and a chuckle here and there will do.

I think Tim Brooks did deliver a good read. The chapters are short quick snap shots of his experience traveling cross country.
I picked it up because I LOVED Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. (dated but truly a worthy read). Tim Brooks is not Steinbeck but he is a good writer. He kept even the most dire circumstances light and fast reading. He pulls you in, he gives you something to chew on and occasionally the outcome is utterly surprising. Hang in there through the midwest, it gets better. No particular highlights but he does meet some interesting (and some not so interesting) folks. I enjoyed his history account of hitchhiking at the end as well. Fun read. You won't be disappointed if you do not set your sites too high.

As a side note, I thought one other reviewer's comment concerning the fear that surrounds hitchhiking is on target. This country has succumb to so many fear enhancing tactics. Too many good things that are honestly helpful to others get swept away in the torrent of those storming on a crusade to make America a safer place for one and all. Such a shame. At least Tim had the guts to challenge the hysteria and provide us with a good read to boot. Good for Tim.

I had high hopes for this book but was ultimately disappointed. I admittedly read this book some years ago but what has stuck with we all this time is that the author spent half of his time "hitchhiking" across the country in his photographers car. I'm not sure it can technically be called hitchhiking if you know the person doing the driving! The premise certainly had potential but the author didn't capitalize on it!

Tim Brookes had his life changed forever in 1973 when, as a young Oxford student, he met an American girl from Iowa who personified all of the traits that he saw as the best that America had to offer. So infatuated was he with the girl and what she represented to him, that he came to New York City that summer with $90 worth of traveler's checks and the determination to hitchhike across the country and back to an Ontario tobacco farm where he had a summer job waiting. Almost as an afterthought, Brookes applied for a position at the University of Vermont and, against all odds, was eventually offered a position at the university that he still held in 1998 when he decided to relive his 1973 hitchhiking adventure.

Twenty-five years after that first trip, Brookes found that he was not exactly living the dream that he saw for himself back in 1973. He looked in the mirror and saw a twice-divorced middle-aged man who had been working hard for more than a decade to be a good husband and father in his third try at marriage. He was "trudging grimly through the valley of the shadow of debt," had a mortgage and credit card debt, was paying child support, and was working 50-60 hours every week just to stay even. In other words, he was living an existence that typifies the one that most of us know only too well.

Brookes, even in the days prior to September 11, 2001, had the feeling that America had changed in ways that directly impacted the nature of its citizens in a negative way. So, with financial backing from National Geographic magazine, he devised a plan to judge for himself how much Americans had changed in the last twenty-five years. (The magazine also provided a photographer who traveled sometimes ahead of Brookes and sometimes behind him, although very few of his photographs are actually used in the book.)

Brookes did make it all the way to the West Coast and back to his Vermont home, just as he had planned to do. And along the way, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the abundance of kindness from strangers that he had encountered on his first trip was not a thing of the past. The book, in fact, is filled with stories of people who go out of their way to help Brookes just when he most needed the kind of help they had to offer.

But A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow is not quite the adventure that I expected to read when I first picked it up because, for his second trip across the U.S. as a hitchhiker, Brookes makes so many concessions to his age and financial backing that the trip more resembles a controlled experiment than it does a trip left to chance. He travels with a cell phone by which he can almost always contact his photographer to meet him when he has the urge to cover ground more quickly for a day or two. And he has enough cash or credit this time to pamper himself with a motel when his body demands a break or to ride the bus when spots the right connections.

Despite that type of thing (and Brookes, to his credit, makes the concessions an integral part of his story), I did enjoy learning about the people and places that Brookes came to know while crossing the country. And, frankly, being of a similar age, I can sympathize with the knee problems that he described and am impressed that he had the courage to tackle the trip at all.

Very entertaining!! After 25 years of the same old same old, Tim Brookes decides to revisit his past, and hitch-hike across the country and back, the same way that he did in 1973 when he was just 20 years old. Some of the random encounters he has leaves one to wonder, are we really in control, or is there something out there that pulls people to each other. A great book all around!

Often the biggest risk facing summer travels is whether to pick up that lonely hitchhikcer standing on the side of the road. With so much fear built into the idea of hitchhicker, it is hard to believe that you can still make it across this country on with the help of others.