All Gone to Look for America: Riding the Iron Horse Across a Continent (and Back) - Softcover

Millar, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906413967 ISBN 13: 9781906413965

Publisher: Arcadia Books, 2012

Synopsis

At the age of 52 and with a shoestring budget, Peter Millar set about rediscovering the United States by following the last traces of the technological wonder that created the country in the first place - the railroad. On a rail network ravaged and reduced he managed to cross the continent in slow motion, talking to people and taking in their stories and concerns while watching the vast landscape unfold.

Wry, witty, intelligent and always observant, this ''inland empire'' should appeal to modern Britons keen to get beneath the skin of this influential nation.

About this title

Review:

'It fills a hole for those who love trains, microbrewery beer and the promise of big skies and wide open spaces.' --Telegraph

About the Author:

Peter Millar is an award-winning British journalist, author and translator, and has been a correspondent for Reuters, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting on the dying stages of the Cold War, his account of which 1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in its Downfall was named best read by The Economist.

An inveterate wanderer since his youth, Peter Millar grew up in Northern Ireland and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before and during his university years, he hitchhiked and travelled by train throughout most of Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain to Moscow and Leningrad, as well as hitchhiking barefoot from Dubrovnik to Belfast after being robbed in the former Yugoslavia. He has had his eyelashes frozen in the coldest inhabited place on Earth - Oymyakon, eastern Siberia, where temperatures reach minus 71ºC, was fried at 48ºC in Turkmenistan, dipped his toes in the Mississippi, the Mekong and the Nile, the Dniepr and the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhone, the Seine and the Spree. He crisscrossed the USA by rail for his book All Gone To Look for America and rattled down the spine of Cuba for Slow Train to Guantanamo. He has lived and worked in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, attended the funerals of two Soviet leaders, been blessed six times by Pope John Paul II (which would have his staunch Protestant ancestors spinning in their graves), and he has survived multiple visits to the Munich Oktoberfest and the enduring agony of supporting Charlton Athletic.

Peter speaks French, German, Russian and Spanish, and is married with two grown-up sons. He splits his time between Oxfordshire and London, and anywhere else that will have him.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcadia Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1906413967
• ISBN 13: 9781906413965
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 336