The somewhat offputting title refers to the three-month journey Brookes made across America in 1973 at the age of 20. Describing how he traveled from east to west, touching into Canada and then returning home, the author offers a valid perspective on what has changed over 25 years. A professor, essayist on National Public Radio, and author (e.g., Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness), Brookes is more than qualified to write an account of this sort. However, he lacks the vital art of sharing his emotions and capturing and entertaining the reader so skillfully demonstrated by the likes of Dervla Murphy, Tim Cahill, and Bill Bryson. Since this is a National Geographic title, one expects high-caliber, exciting, and engaging writing. What one gets instead is rather disappointing; there is an underlying sense that this book is the completion of an assignment rather than a work of passion. An optional purchase.AJo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In 1973, Brookes, then a British student, spent three months hitchhiking across America, dazzled by a girl from Iowa he had met at Oxford. In 1998, Brookes, now a writer, teacher, and longtime Vermonter, decides to re-create that experience and hitchhike to the same places again. He's not crazy: he periodically takes trains or buses and carries a cell phone in his daughter's sock. He tracks a few of the people and most of the places he encountered the first time, but this is no self-referential wallowing. He's not interested in reliving the past but in illuminating the present, and he carries both a cheerful lack of anxiety and a disarming lack of pretense. In crisp, short chapters, he recounts conversations with the folks who pick him up and his responses to the places he goes: a gospel church in San Francisco; a previous wife in Seattle; a desolate reservation in South Dakota. He finds kindness and gratitude, and he clearly has those within himself as well. GraceAnne A. DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
(
