The Kindness Diaries

The Kindness Diaries
© 2014  Leo Logothetis
288 pages

                        Is it possible to travel the world just on the kindness of strangers? Leo Logothetis was inspired to find out after reading Che Guevara’s account of touring South America by motorbike. Well, almost; The Kindness Diaries follows Leo from Los Angeles to New York,  Spain to Turkey, and – after an airplane jump to India – down through Southeast Asia.   Taking nothing for his journey, Leo’s every move is dependent on the kindness of others, from his starting tank of gas in L.A, to every meal and every night’s shelter.  He does this not because he is personally poor and wants to see the world, but because depending on others opens his and the strangers’ lives to one another. He tells them his story; they tell him his. Along the way he meets with both good luck and bad – Indians adored his yellow motorbike, as one was the hero of a Bollywood film, whereas the Vietnamese government refused to allow anyone to enter the country with an object they could not carry. (One-ton bikes are notoriously difficult to tote by hand.)   This is a book with the impress of a TV show, a highlight reel in text. Like modern reality shows, there’s a twist: Leo not only throws himself on the mercy of strangers and talks about the meaning of life with them, but he returns ordinary kindnesses with extraordinary ones.  Throughout his trip, Leo changes lives by meeting  people’s needs – giving a farmer a cow, a struggling rickshaw driver his own rent-free cab, free water filtration systems for a village in India, and so on.  It’s nice, but between that and people exchanging their secrets of life (with aphorisms like“Live in the moment”),  sometimes it felt like a saccharine gimmick. I think that's more of a jaded reader problem, though -- even with a film crew following him

 

Related:
The Man who Cycled the World, Mark Beaumont
Into Thick Air,  Jim Mauser

Both are of the see the world, be helped by strangers,  discover yourself, and be filmed doing it genre.

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? Five Kids Meet their Country
© 1990 John Siegel Boettner
with excerpts from the journals of Heather Deutsch, Joy Fulton, Jimmy West, Carl Fagerlin, and Ethan Turpin.
439 pages

The United States isn't a nation that makes touring it by bike easy: those who wish to do it must tackle mountain ranges,  broad deserts, a cornucopia of potential natural disasters -- and that's not even including American drivers. Imagine trying to do it while simultaneously watching over five teenagers --  five kids, really, a group of three boys and two girls, all eleven between eleven and thirteen years old. That's what John Siegel Boettner, a middle-school teacher in California, did in the year of 1986. Beginning at the start of summer break, he and his wife toured with the kids from Washington, D.C. across the continent to Oregon, then down California to their home, a journey of nearly five thousand miles -- braving tornadoes, heat waves, snowstorms, and a string of mechanical problems, all in an effort to teach the kids about their country.

John Siegel Boettner isn't your usual teacher: the fact that's he willing to take care of five of his kids for four months across the nation and through a variety of disasters might already indicate that.  An avid cyclist, as soon as he began teaching he organized a bicycle club and began taking his kids on extended trips called "Educational Safaris": in one, he and his wards biked through the northeast,  exploring the sites of the American Revolution. Not only did the bike trips give the kids an opportunity to learn about themselves, of what they could achieve through their effort alone, but it made their history, their culture, come more alive...and such was their teacher's intention here, as after Mississippi they follow the Oregon Trail to the west coast.  By day, John is their leader, captain, mechanic, and coach, helping them to organize and keep moving, and calling the shots when things get hairy...as they did, often.  Unlike David Lamb's Over the Hills,  Hey Mom is peppered with near-disasters, usually near the mountains. By night, he's a teacher, reading to them from the journals of an Oregon Trail pioneer whose path they follow and whose experiences are an eerie mirror of their own.  The trip extends a month past summer vacation, but John feels no guilt about keeping the kids about of school. In his view, the experiences they are gaining on the road are worth far more than a month of memorization and regurgitation. This is the trip of a lifetime, the intimate details of which John accounts in the book, and when it was finished I felt sad, as though I'd been part of the experience and it was now over.

Before leaving on the trip, John read to his kids from Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America;  Jenkins, too, transversed the nation in an effort to learn about it, to spend time with its people. Like Jenkins before them, John, his wife, and the kids gain much from the kindness of strangers...and strangers across the continent are very kind indeed to a band of kids doing what most think impossible even for adults, crossing a land of three thousand miles by bicycle.   Although this is the story of a journey, it's more about the people -- both the kids involved, like young Ethan who could barely ride a bike when the tale began, and the people who they meet, like the Amish folk in Tennessee.  I find accounts of people walking or cycling the entire country to be fascinating by themselves, but Hey Mom is extraordinary for featuring kids, whose energy, idealism, and joy and make a work to revel in reading.

Very much recommended. 

Related:

• The author giving a TEDx talk called "The Joy of Looking", in which he shares how one of his cycling students taught him the lesson of The Dead Poets' Society: gather rosebuds while ye may.. It's beautiful.
• A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins

Read of England 2012

Last week, Britons celebrated or observed Guy Fawkes Night on 5 November, a date I usually try to do some English-themed reading around, just as I do readings for the Fourth of July and Bastille Day. This year's reading consisted of my finishing off Bernard Cornwell's excellent King Arthur trilogy, along with two nonfiction works: Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island and Kate Fox's Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.

To start off my set, I decided to take a tour of Britain with Bill Bryson, an American humorist author who lived in England for twenty years, beginning in the 1970s.  Before returning to the United States, Bryson decided to mull over his adopted homeland  by traveling over it, in part repeating the journey he made upon first arriving. Bryson is a riotous author for me, and here he's of course an entertaining guide, cheerfully rambling through the country, offering commentary that varies from serious reflections on English culture to absurd thoughts and irrelevant tangents.  At the outset, when repeating his initial 1970s travels, the commentary  compares the Britain of his youth to Britain today, though the changes he notes (in the flowering of chain stores, the destruction of older architectural for modern boxes) are scarcely for the better.  Even so, this is a delightfully fun book.

Kate Fox's Watching the English takes a more serious tack, slightly so. The author has a earnest endeavor -- scrutinizing English culture with an anthropologist's eye -- but she offers a spirited analysis. Although her intent is to discern the rules governing English behavior by watching how Britons act, she's no passive observer,  instead turning her fellow Brits into lab rats and experimenting on them. She devotes afternoons to jumping queues (cutting into lines) and bumping into people on purpose, noting how many of them automatically apologize. As she studies one area of English life after another -- work, hobbies, sex, shopping -- patterns emerge, rules which interact with one another, and eventually the patterns create a cohesive analysis of English culture. Fox declares that the English are fundamentally socially anxious, and that many English behaviors act to counter that awkwardness. The weather, for instance, is not actually all that interesting to English folk, regardless how how incessantly they speak of it: instead, talking about the weather is a way to be social without being impolite, to make a human connection without seeming weird.  Fox sees her countrymen and women as being desperate for fellowship, but denied it by a culture that encourages emotional coolness -- reserve, moderation, and the respect of privacy. Other aspects of English culture she touches on are the prevalence of class consciousness (which is ubiquitous, being expressed and betrayed not just by the word you use to describe household furniture, but which items you are willing to buy from a Mark's and Spencer), English humor, and a fundamental belief in fair play.  While I can't judge her book against personal experience (not yet having traveled  to England's green and pleasant land), I found it utterly engaging and entertainingly written.

Bicycle Diaries

Bicycle Diaries
© 2009 David Byrne
297 pages

Though I've never heard of the musician and visual artist David Bryne before, his recollections of time spent in some of the world's greatest cities had my attention from the start -- for he experienced them on the saddle of a bike, bringing a fold-up bicycle with him as part of his luggage. The bicycle allows him to explore cities more intimately than from a car, but more quickly than on foot -- and while he cycles through Berlin, Istanbul, London, Buenos Aires, he ponders on subjects which they inspire.

Every city inspires musing on different matters. He begins with a fantastic critique of American cities that is right out of The Geography of Nowhere: I posted a selection here. In Buenos Aires, he writes about the local music scene: in Berlin, a visit to the Stasi museum prompts an essay about justification and human nature. Thoughts on biking bookend the text; his final section on New York focuses mainly on its attempts to become a more bike-friendly city, and the epilogue addresses the bicycle's potentially expanding role in the future as energy crises force us to make more intelligent decisions about where we live and how we get around. These and the opening section on American cities made the book for me.

Cities featured are Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Sydney, London, San Francisco, and New York.

50 Jobs in 50 States

50 Jobs in 50 States: One Man's Journey of Discovery Across America
© 2011 Daniel Seddiqui
275 pages

Disclaimer: I read from an advanced review copy of the book, available through NetGalleys. No compensation for a review, good or negative, was offered or requested, aside from my own potential enjoyment of the book.


Frustrated and crushed by scores of failed job interviews, author Daniel Seddiqui felt like an utter loser. After breaking down in the parking lot of his local Macy's -- after returning the suit he bought for one such interview -- this athlete-turned-volunteer coach decided to pursue a dream, to 'live the map' of America by travelling throughout the continent and working a job in every state. With the support of his pseudo-girlfriend Sasha and a network of family and friends throughout the country, Daniel hid the road, determined to experience each state's most signature job for a week.

The trip starts out fairly mundane -- preparing care packages in a Mormon humanitarian office -- but future states bring more sensational opportunities, like serving stock cars at the Indy 500, serving drinks during New Orleans' Mardi Gras, and giving Hawaiian tourists surfing lessons. North America's wealth in natural resources creates a wide variety of jobs, and Seddiqui seems to have gotten his hands dirty by engaging in most of them -- meatpacking, farming,  mining, and logging all feature.  Aside from a streak of agricultural jobs (broken when he decides to sell real estate in Idaho instead of farming potatoes),  Seddiqui is able to find vastly different work every week: at one point, he transitions from modeling in North Carolina to coal mining in West Virginia.  His effort to find every state's most culturally significant job is generally successful (cheese-making in Wisconsin, working with automobiles in Michigan), though there are surprises along the way. Seddiqui sometimes chose jobs slightly off the mark out of necessity (Sorry, Daniel, you can't show up at Fenway Park and play for the Red Sox), but most of his fifty choices seemed appropriate. There's overlap between his and Stephen Fry's choices:  when the British journalist visited each of the U.S.'s fifty states, he sometimes participated in that state's most prominent job: both men realized that lobstering in Maine is far beyond their endurance level, both descend into West Virginia's coal mines, and both participated in political rallies in New Hampshire (Seddequi makes "Obama Cares" posters and manages to slip a complimentary note to the president without being tackled and manhandled by the Secret Service, quite a feat given his partial Afghan heritage that had him mistaken as an illegal immigrant while in Arizona).

Seddequi's account is certainly readable: I read the book in a single sitting, and found him generally pleasant traveling companion. His tone is informal and conversational, perhaps overly so --for at times he makes comments about people that seem inappropriate in this context. His deteriorating relationship with Sasha (which ends for good when he is in Arkansas doing excavation work and heartily agrees with graffiti that reads "Sasha Sucks") gives the reader an idea of his emotional difficulties, He also makes comments about the girls he tries to date while on the road, which strikes me as entirely out of place.  Aside from this, however, he was an agreeable host. While the book ends with a brief chapter about lessons he learned on the road and appears to be targeted as inspirational, I enjoyed it more for the occupational accounts. I learned much about some of the best and worst jobs in the United States, and his tales of on-the-road hospitality are heartening.

50 Jobs in 50 States will be available from Berrett-Koehler on 15 March 2011.

Related:

• Fifty Jobs, the book's official website.
• "Living the Map", the author's website -- a name he trademarked while working as an incorporation specialist in Delaware.
• Stephen Fry in America, Stephen Fry

In a Sunburned Country

In a Sunburned Country
© 2001 Bill Bryson
352 pages

Bill Bryson takes on the largest island in the world in In a Sunburned Country,  traveling its coasts and dashing into the heart of the outback to gaze upon some of the most wondrous natural scenery to be found on Earth in around three weeks. Though some of his other journey books take place on foot, Australia is far too vast to experience in such a way. Even by train and rental car, much of the trip is marked by hours of travel through the wilderness. Bryson spends most of his time in Australia's cities, though, most of which are clustered in the southern 'boomerang'.   Like A Walk in the Woods, Bryson begins his journey by reading about the terrifying perils that await him -- especially the wildlife -- and later uses this knowledge to entertain and terrify those who travel with him. Aside from the pleasure he takes in doing this, Bryson seems like an agreeable fellow to explore a new place with -- he pokes his nose into every facet of life he can, never ceases to ask questions or make witty observations, and prefers to end days on the road by exploring local communities, winding up at a pub wiling away the hours.

In addition to describing his travel experiences, Bryson also engages the reader with a history of Australia, its provinces and towns, and also provides the odd science lesson -- commenting on how Australia's isolation led to its incredible and varied abundance of animals and plants, many of which can be found no other place on earth. To Bryson, Australia is an immense paradise -- teeming with life, and yet bizarrely empty. That abundance of life is all the more striking considering the hostility of Australia's climate, marked by scorching heat and long periods of drought and floods.  Bryson's own travels were uneventful in this regard -- the only wildlife he records was a small echidna in a natural park, and only once did the threat of weather stop him. (He had to wait for a flood warning in Queensland to pass before continuing north, an odd experience for me to read given the sweeping floods in Queensland at the moment.)  Despite the lack of drama, there's no shortage of entertainment between Bryson's commentary and the regular misfortunes of travel: at one point Bryson drove three hundred miles into the desert to take in a particularly momentous site, only to realize there were no open hotel rooms in town -- meaning he had to drive three hundred more miles before finding any rest.

Recommended easily if you're interested in Australia or a good laugh.

Over the Hills

Over the Hills: A Midlife Escape Across America by Bicycle
© 1996 David Lamb
254 pages

Despite a life of front-line journalism in Vietnam and Rwanda, LA Times journalist David Lamb feels as though his lifestyle has become positively sedentary as he approaches middle age. In an attempt to prove to himself that he's capable of great deeds, he decides to travel across the country -- on a touring bike. After cursory preparation, Lamb hits the road with his saddlebags and makes his way across the hills and valleys of the Eastern coast, through the southwestern deserts, and over the Rockies straight to Santa Monica's pier. Since pedestrians and cyclists are barred from the interstates,  Lamb keeps to the backroads, including the venerable Route 66, stopping to chat up local townsfolk on deserted city streets and pedaling for his life to escape from packs of aggressive dogs in farm country.

The trip itself is absent of drama, aside from the dog chases: there are no accidents, no close calls, no miserable slogs through blinding storms. Lamb manages to avoid rain the entire time, the only inclement weather being the 'headwinds' of the plains which slow him down considerably.  His travel log consists of descriptions of the passing landscape, particularly the small towns he beds in, his dealings with the people he meets, and ruminations about life on the road. He adds to this a history of the bicycle, and its role in shaping the United States' social and transportation history.

I enjoy stories about people who hit the open road and go where it takes them, exploring and venturing into the unknown, and Over the Hills was no exception. While Lamb doesn't use his isolation on the road to delve into philosophy and the meaning of life (as did Peter Jenkins in A Walk Across America), I enjoyed his encounters with small-town America all the same, though aside from the 'ordinary kindnesses' the strangers offered there was little good news to be had. Most towns, Lamb wrote, had picked up and moved to interstate exit ramps,  leaving the old communities to rot in abandonment.  More cheery than this was the fascinating history of the bicycle in American culture, which Lamb concludes by detailing how modern cities are attempting to encourage bicycle activity.  Parts of the book are dated ($15-and $20 motel rooms?!), but  it's a fun ride read.

Related:

• A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins
• A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryon

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods
© 1998 Bill Bryson
274 pages

Bill Bryson was so startled to find an entrance to the Appalachian Trail in his backyard that he figured, why not hike it? End to end, it's only a little over two thousand miles of hills, moutains, dense woodlands,  and bear dens.  Nothing a man in his forties can't handle!  As soon as spring arrives, Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz drive to Georgia and start a grueling hike through some of America's wildest country. Neither of them have any idea what they're in for.

This story of two sarcastic middle-aged men bumbling through the woods and mountains is unavoidably entertaining. Bryson prepares himself by reading a book full of grisly bear attacks, and on their first day out Katz decides to start flinging supplies into the woods to lighten his load -- including essentials which doom them to eating soup for weeks on end while they choke on mouthfuls of black flies, attempt to ditch an obnoxious co-hiker who latches on to them, and dodge peril a time or two, all the while ranting and raving enthusiastically.  The two don't attempt the trail all at once, and indeed don't even walk it in full: after realizing they'll never finish in one season, they opt to concentrate on particularly lauded legs of the trail. Though their adventures in the wilderness are entertaining enough, Bryson complements this with running historic and scientific commentary.  I heard of the book when searching for information on Centralia, Pennsylvania, which Bryson visits: a long-running underground coal fire turned the area into a wasteland of collapsed roads and noxious fumes belching from the ground. His descriptions there, as throughout the rest of the book, are evocative.

A Walk in the Woods has whet my appetite for Bryson as a travel guide and humorist; I understand he's recorded his adventures living and hiking in Europe and Australia,  which though I don't have library access to, I hope to read at some point. I've already recommended this to a couple of my hiking friends, and  but even if you've no interest in the outdoors at all, this book is worth your while just for the laughs.

Stephen Fry in America

Stephen Fry in America: Fifty States and the Man Who Set Out to See Them All
© 2008 Stephen Fry
314 pages

While I am not familiar with Stephen Fry's work,  his reputation for humor and science advocacy  lured me me into checking this book out. Fry introduces himself as someone who has always regarded America with a certain affection, having 'almost' been born there and having wondered since the age of ten what his life would have been like had he been in the United States.  When invited to do a series on America, he opted to take a tour of each of its fifty states over the course of nearly a year, meeting the people and finding the 'real' America from the cozy confines of a black London taxi.

Fry gives the obvious tourist attractions a miss, preferring to beat the bushes and immerse himself in people's lives and local cultures, especially music. His direct approach takes him up in a hot-air balloon, on a tour of a body farm, into a coal mine, and into the depths of a submarine.  Few tourists would make the ruined Lower Ninth Quarter or spend a night with the homeless, but Fry does -- and his celebrity allows him to access people and places far removed from poverty. He chats with Ted Turner at the Turner Bison ranch, hangs around with Morgan Freeman at the club Freeman owns, and participates in making an Oscar award. Most of the landscapes he visits are awe-inspiring, and the publisher indulges its readers with two-page landscape spreads.

I checked out the book in part because I wanted to witness an outsider reacting to America as he experienced it, and Fry provides reaction in abundance; reaction is the heart of comedy. Like Mary Roach, he plunges head-first into humiliating, awkward, and sometimes dangerous situations for the experience. The book isn't all humor and rapt awe: Fry is honestly trying to get a handle on what America is, and concludes that understanding America means understanding the regional cultures. In general, Fry finds trends in urban geography unsettling (commercial strips and chain stores ruining downtowns) and American cheese disgusting, but is constantly impressed by the nation's energy and optimism and ends the book a bigger fan of American than when he started.

Although the book is chiefly aimed at the BBC's audience, Americans will find plenty here to enjoy. Fry is entertaining, and his journey reveals some things I never knew myself -- like that Alaska is still influenced by its original status as a Russian colony,

Walking towards Walden

Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place
© 1995 John Hanson Mitchell
301 pages

Just before he set out on his journey to the netherworld, the great pilgrim Dante Alighieri had to pass through a lion-haunted forest where the straight way was lost. Here in twentieth-century America, there is a gloomy forest of hemlocks just below the summit of Prospect Hill in Westford, Massachusetts. As we descend this fertile slope, the great pilgrim Barkley Mason begins quoting from the Inferno. He touches his breast and, with a grand sweep, spreads his right arm toward the dark wood below us. "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai nella selva oscura --'" he declaims.

Kata is used to Barkley's posturing; she interrupts to ask me something about a mutual friend, and in this manner, we three enter the dark forest and enter our journey. (p.11)

While browsing the travel section of my library, I spied Walking Towards Walden, one man's deeply textured account of his pilgrimage trip to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau once lived and wrote.  Mitchell, accompanied by two close friends, determines to sojourn to Walden through the wilderness: shunning roads and trails, the talkative trio intend to see a glimpse of Massachusets' 17th century wilderness. As this trio of intellectuals and romantics cut their way through brambles, wade across swamps, and wander the courses of streams looking for a crossing, Mitchell muses.

A Walk to Walden tells many stories. From the outset, A Walk is steeped in mythology, both classical and native American: Mitchell likens their quest to find Walden to Campell's "hero's journey", imaginatively interpreting the perils along the way as the hero's challenges a la Don Quixote. As they walk, Mitchell explores inner worlds, pondering the role of nature in mythology and poetry. The trio's pilgrimage to Walden is also historical, for their path intersects with that marched by the Massachusetts militiamen on their way to face British regulars at Lexington and Concord. As the journey develops, Mitchell tells their story, the story of explorers like Ponce de Leon who traveled through the "New World" looking for the fountain of youth,  and the story of the men and women who were displaced and ruined when Europeans began to colonize the Concord area.  At the same time, he also remembers other trips he has taken with his friends -- to the Florida Everglades and Hollywood, with touching and humorous anecdotes.

As the narrative matures, Mitchell compares their journey less to a pilgrimage and more to a quest to find a sense of place, a sense of belonging. He uses a Hopi word, tuwanasaapi, to describe a place where the soul of an individual is "centered":  where they are truly home. James Howard Kunstler decried the lack of "place" in the United States, criticizing the boundless expanses of subdivided homes and commercial strips. Mitchell and his friends are likewise bothered by this lack of community and place in modern America:  traveling to Walden allows them to connect to Thoreau's own decision to live deliberately, to find

From the very moment I started reading the book, I wanted to see Concord. Mitchell's affection for the town and the sense of place and community he derives from it are obvious. The day's journey there from Prospect Hill is lush, rich with detail and stories, abounding in tales of interesting people. Mitchell links all of his various trails of thought together, which would have been distracting were the stories themselves not so thoughtful and enjoyable.  Most curiously, the trio never seem to reach Walden Pond proper: the book ends with their eating a period meal at the Colonial Inn, the only hint that they might have gone to the pond and Thoreau's cabin being "So we saunter to the Holy Land...". (Mitchell periodically paid homage to Thoreau by referencing his "sauntering" walks around Concord.) Walking is one of the most enjoyable books I've yet read, and I heartily recommend it -- especially to those partial to Thoreau.

Travels with Charley

Travels with Charley in Search of America
© 1962 John Steinbeck
246 pages

Author John Steinbeck is perhaps most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the displaced Joad family who travel to California from their home in  Oklahoma in search of work, experiencing the land and its people as they do. In the early sixties, Steinbeck felt that he ought to make a journey of his own -- to truly experience the North American continent and the people of the United States. Since becoming an established author, his travels amounted to air trips between metropolises. Seeking a more familiar perspective, he set out in his camper-truck Rocinante, accompanied by his French bleu poodle Charley, and set forth. Starting in New York, he travels first to Maine, then across the midwest to the Pacific northwest, then down through California, across Texas, and curves upward through the south until he's in New York once more.

Steinbeck writes here with an intentional conversational tone. He often addresses the reader directly, as he does in the beginning when he informs the reader that we should imagine him talking to us while he drives or cooks at night. His reflections about his experiences sometimes take the form of a conversation with his dog, Charley -- and sometimes, Charley talks back.  Steinbeck is gifted at describing the scenery he not only sees, but in the case of wonders like the Redwoods, experiences.  Although he appears to enjoy his conversations with the people he visits,  visiting the South -- in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, where a band of middle-aged women delight in yelling racial slurs at young black children who have won admittance into a whites-only public school --  sours his mood as he returns home.

A recurring theme in Steinbeck's observations is the increasing homogeneity and staleness of American culture. National television and radio outlets have created a standard American language, and he despairs the loss of regional dialects. He has little love for the increasing role of plastic in everyday lives, and what it represents: mass-produced artificiality.

Although the trip ends on a poor note and Steinbeck does not like all of what he sees, he tempers his grumbling with the knowledge that is the nature of people to resist change in their old age. Perhaps America has lost some of its wild vivaciousness, but he doesn't take his complaints as withering criticisms. Travels abounds with humor,  benefiting from Steinbeck's dry wit and some of the conversations he has themselves.  I read this first in 2005, and it has lingered with me since:  this was the first work I ever read that grappled with changing culture in a real way. For its story, Steinbeck's musings, and his humor, I would recommend Travels with Charley.

A Walk Across America

A Walk Across America
© 1979 Peter Jenkins
288 pages

We walked straight west. I had everything I needed in the world resting comfortably on my shoulders, and the entire country waiting to be discovered.  (p.55)

In the late spring of 1973, Peter Jenkins decided to go for a walk. The increasingly jaded college graduate, still recovering from a divorce, was willing to quit America all together. War and government corruption rendered him a cynic about the country's worth and promise, and a growing sense of wanderlust urged him to drop off the grid altogether. Urged by family members to see first-hand the country he was willing to leave on foot, Jenkins and his Alaskan Malamute Cooper set off on a journey to meet the land and people. The whole of the journey is not contained within this book, for he stops in New Orleans to chronicle the first great part of the story. Beginning in Connecticut, Jenkins hikes to D.C, then through the Carolinas and Virginia, across part of Tennessee, down through Alabama, and then west across the Gulf Coast until he stops to rest in New Orleans.

The road between Connecticut and Louisiana connects Jenkins' story with the lives of others -- an old mountain man with a reputation for shooting intruders,  grizzled lumberyard workers, ranchers, hippies, evangelists,  the Alabamian governor, paranoid drunks, and murderous lawmen. He meets friends and foes as he hikes through the mountains and down to the Gulf Coast, braving the Appalachian winter and the Deep South's humid, scorching summers. Although few photographs depict the surroundings, their beauty is made clear through Jenkins' descriptions, and the stories he tells about the characters he meets are almost too hard to believe -- particularly one in which he was literally run out of town by a lynch mob, keen on doing him in for looking like a hippie. Jenkin's stories are set in a different time: when he walks through Selma, Alabama, for instance, the massacre at the town's bridge during the Civil Rights movement is only a few years in the past. Segregationist George Wallace still reigns supreme in Montgomery, and in Tennessee, Stephen Gaskin's "Farm" is growing in size.  Jenkins spends the better part of a year navigating from Connecticut to Orleans, occasionally stopping to work in order to save up money for another leg of the journey. He spends a few weeks at The Farm, noting that its emphasis on simplicity seems contrived next to the simplicity of life he's found on the road: he moves on when the cultish atmosphere spooks him.

Jenkins is an enjoyable writer, communicating the humor, terror, despondency, and hope that his walk stirs in him. I identified with him immediately, being a restless college graduate who also wants to retreat from modern society. His tone made it clear that between starting the journey and writing the novel, he's converted to something: he introduces his Connecticut self in the same way Bill O'Reilly might introduce a guest he despises.  That tone makes him hard to take seriously, but once he hits the road his experiences take first priority. Although many of the stories are hilarious in themselves, he often sets up jokes. In the final section, for instance, he writes that he looked forward to staying at the seminary in New Orleans for a while: there would be no girls, there, no distractions. Naturally he meets his second wife. Sections are headed off by illustrations that overlay scenes from his travels across a map of his route: I particularly enjoyed these illustrations.

A sectional illustration, depicting a revival scene in Mobile (where Jenkins was "saved", one of Mobile's great trees (which he fawned over), a farmhouse he stayed at for a week or so, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a Civil Rights monument. 

A Walk Across America will remain one of the more interesting books I've read, I think. Although I enjoyed reading a book about life on the road -- something I've been looking for for a while now -- Jenkins' story resonated with me not only because of our similar stations in life when he started this walk, but for the places he walked through. While Americans -- and particularly those who live along the eastern and southeastern coasts of America -- will enjoy this most, I would recommend it to  general audiences for the stories alone. Jenkins has written other books, which I will be reading.

Related:

• Into the Wild

The Motorcycle Diaries

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
© Ernesto Guevara (Ocean Press 2004)
175 pages

"Along the roads of our daydream we reached remote countries, navigated tropical seas and traveled all through Asia. And suddenly, slipping in as if part of our fantasy, the question arose:
'Why don't we go to North America?'
'North America? But how?'
'On La Poderosa, man.'


I know very little of "Che" Guevara except that he is regarded as a revolutionary, idolized and hated by many. When I saw The Motorcycle Diaries on a reccommended reading list, I decided it might serve as an introduction to the man. The story begins before Guevara does the things for which he is so famous:  at this point, he is but a student nearly finished with his medical education. He and his friend decide to drive their motorcycle La Poderosa northward:  The Motorcycle Diaries is the chronicle of their journey, written after the fact and augmented by Guevara's musings on how his perceptions have changed.  As the two journey up the western coast of South America (through Chile and Peru before traveling east to Venezuela),  they are taken by both the beauty of the land, the hospitality of strangers, and the misery of working conditions for many, particularly miners. Although Guevara's political sentiments do not appear often, when they do they are expressed with a strong passion. Most memorable  are his opinions that the time has come for politicians to stop talking about their accomplishments and actually do something to help the working people and that the United States' interference in the affairs of nations like Chile must end if the people of those nations are to prosper. As said, I do not know much about Che the man and found the book to be of most inference when he waxed poetically about the landscape or described the living conditions of people.

The book should be  of obvious interest to those interested in Che Guervara, as well as to those interested in living and political conditions of South America during the time.

Lost on Planet China

Lost on Planet China: One Man's Quest to Understand the Most Mysterious Country in the World
© 2088 J. Maarten Troost
382 pages

While looking for a book on Chinese history, I encountered this travelogue and decided to give it a go. Lost on Planet China is the account of J. Maarten Troost's extended stay in China, which spans weeks at the very least. In beginning the book he writes on the subject of China's changing image in the world. He knows that China is not what it was during his childhood -- during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward -- and given its rising prominence in world affairs, he decides to visit it. Troost's perspective is an interesting one: both of his parents were European (Czech and Dutch) and he apparently spent his childhood in the Netherlands, although he now lives in the United States. The book is quite funny: he documents his initial reactions (and acclimated responses to) to various aspects of Chinese culture: the language barrier, the idea of children urinating in the street, the complete normality of dead livestock blocking sidewalks, the presence of street lamps decorated with Tibetan swastikas, and the art of haggling for the "Chinese price".

Although the book is entertaining and funny, it is also informative in that Troost adds commentary to what he observes. He sees China still trying to create an identidy for itself -- embracing the wild materialism of the United States while hanging on to the Cultural Revolution and trying to decide whether to divorce itself from or embrace the past. It was well worth the time I spent read, and if you are at all interested in what experiencing China is like, I reccommend it.