People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways [Paperback]

Eric Chaet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

A hitchhiker criss-crosses the United States, posting "signs" on utility poles from New York to Los Angeles, winter and summer, year after year. Sometimes he stops to earn money. All kinds of people tell him their stories; some ask him his.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...glorious eccentricity...challenge to the established order...by being who he is.... I can heartily recommend reading Chaet." -- Bernd Wechner, Hitch-hiking, Feb. 1, 2002, Suite101.com™

"...wholly original...struggles against fatigue to hear the stories of...people who picked him up...purposeful...." -- Martin Brick, Wisconsin Review, Volume 36, Number 3

From the Publisher

Of Eric Chaet, Norbert Blei has said, "He's one of those American writers bigger than any form can hold," who "writes in [the] tradition of...Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Ginsberg, Kerouac," and "has set a simple task for himself: To change the world."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, "Chaet is a uniquely American kind of genius."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Turnaround Artist Productions (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970696507
• ISBN-13: 978-0970696502
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,928,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Journey, July 19, 2001

By 

Ken Miller (Newtown, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (Paperback)

"People I Met Hitchhiking" is about a man on a journey to help people by posting his messages on telephone poles. Simple messages, phrases that will perhaps motivate people to be better human beings, but this is not the point of the book. As reflected in the title, the fascinating part of the book is the stories about the people the author meets on the road. Stories of ordinary people's dreams, flaws, ideas, insanity, generosity and cruelty. In it is a vital reflection of the extremes of the human condition, told in a very simple way. Eric's narration wanders from the concrete to the dreamlike, connecting the past with the present at times, but following a larger narrative frame. Stories of bad jobs, good jobs, growing, relationships and living punctuate the hitchhiking episodes, explaining much about what it means to be alive in this world. It's about the freedom to travel and the slavery to wage jobs, and how real people live day to day, and how the poor are undermined and dehumanized by the rich and each other. It's a piece of work that is a fascinating portrait of America, at once beautiful and horrible, awkward and elegant, but extremely rewarding.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing & Saying It as It is, April 15, 2004

By 

Simon Mol (Warsaw, Poland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (Paperback)

The characters I encountered in "People I Met Hitchhiking" are reminiscent of the characters one runs into while reading the novels of James Hadley Chase. Chase was a writer who had an unrivalled penchant for inventing characters and a dramatic ability for activating them with contagious emotions that sank into the minds of his readers. While the works of Chase, though inspired by reality, were chiefly fictions, "People I Met Hitchhiking" portrays the tumultuous challenges of daily existence in the endeavour to live out dreams, which viewed from a distance, appear trivial, yet culminate in the factor that distinguishes `The men' from `The boys'. With most of his work plotted on the grass-root level of the American society, Chase was a writer who had a profound, encyclopaedic knowledge of social psychology and human character. "People I Met Hitchhiking" starts where Chase's work ends, thereby fulfilling the mission of visionary fiction through the personal, pragmatic experiences of an individual, now put at the benefit of others. This is an indispensable, practical handbook for those seeking to understand better life in the US as it is.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lost world brought back to life ..., January 28, 2005

By 

tommyboyzillion - See all my reviews

This review is from: People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (Paperback)

Eric Chaet, like few people you've probably met if you are under 50, hiked the back roads and byways of this magnificent land with an idealist's (and an iconoclast's) spirit and faith, a couple of bucks, a lot of error and a lot of footwork.

He gamely recorded--like a latter-day John Lomax, but in the relatively reserved, reflected medium of the written word--his impressions of American life and of personalities met along the way.

The results are not pretty: neither the book's homely, vanity-press look nor the Economy Plan writing are going to wow fans of the flowery Kerouac or the devisedly affecting F. O'Connor or C. McCarthy, never mind the irreadably over-intent Faulkner. (Pick a litteratus whose signature dishonesty screams "Edit me!") But there's no fakery here. Just the facts, ma'am. Is such drudge, from such a trudge, anything? Yes: it's the world Out There, ab-literate.

(On the rather minor, presentational score, can we cut an ordinary citizen, cutting his own way through the Breaks, holes in pockets, his own break?)

Chaet's memoir constitutes one of the last, best time capsules of the world of the innocent, average 'hiker'--the real road warrior. It's a world now all but obscured by the faux 'interestingness' of the wild (not wilderness) pursuits of the REInoscenti--downhillers, all--whose 'adventures' ever trend 'upscale' on their way downslope to the depressingly familiar: monied, hi-tech and insular Xtreme Escapes available only to--perhaps imaginable only by--the rich and the bored.