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

Brookes, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792276833 ISBN 13: 9780792276838

Publisher: National Geographic, 2000

Synopsis

Tim Brookes was a 20-year-old Oxford student when he first succumbed to the lure of America's open road. Equipped with a change of clothes, a cheap guitar, and the youthful wanderlust of the Easy Rider era, he spent the summer of '73 hitchhiking from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, an exhilarating experience that ultimately led him to leave old England to settle in New England. He's been here ever since. Twenty-five years later, he hit the road again, traveling light and following his thumb in a free-form re-creation of his first cross-country trip. His friends told him that times had changed, that fear stalked America's highways now, and that the only drivers who'd pick him up were bound to be as crazy as he was to undertake such an odyssey. But his friends were wrong, as this vivid and eventful book makes colorfully clear. Highlighted by wonderful photographs, "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" revisits old stomping grounds and discovers new ones, tracks down old friends and makes new ones, remembers old impressions of America and deftly sketches new vignettes of a country at once very different and surprisingly the same. In Manhattan, a rendezvous with an old girlfriend evokes all the changes wrought by a quarter-century of passing time, but it's not long before the seventies spring back to life in Sausalito when a hippie couple in a classic VW microbus pull over to offer Brookes a ride. He barrels across Nebraska with a gay trucker whose semi is linked by satellite to his home base a dozen states away, and blasts through the switchbacks of a mountain pass on a hair-raising ride in an ex-con's battered pickup. In Las Vegas he finds a neon-lit 24/7 time warp, while only a few miles away a high-desert ghost town summons up another kind of timelessness. On a back road in Ohio, we meet a beautiful Amish girl driving a horse-drawn buggy to a birthday party; half a continent away, a leather-jacketed Harley chick, is one of 300,000 bikers who roar into a little South Dakota town every year for a week-long blast. And these are only a few of the American originals who populate a book that captures all the spontaneous serendipity of the hitchhiker's vagabond life. Keenly observed, entertaining, and eloquent, "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" weaves past and present into a unique, ever-changing tapestry of intertwined roads and lives.

About this title

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

From Library Journal:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0792276833
• ISBN 13: 9780792276838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304