Feasting on the Breeze: A Memoir of Hitchhiking America at the Turn of the Century PDF Download

Author: Carl Cole
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1257114700
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In 1998 I left everything I'd ever known behind and began a journey that would last a lifetime.I strapped on a backpack and hit the road with no particular destination in mind. I was looking for something that made sense in a world of confusion and lies. I wanted to witness a different perspective on life and find somewhere to belong. From the gutters of New Orleans to the mountains of Colorado, and beyond, an unexplicable desire forced me to keep a detailed journal of the events that transpied. This is that journal. Heralded as "On the Road' for the New Millenium" by Daniel Quinn, best-selling author of Ishmael.

Author: Carl Cole
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1257008633
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Since the time of The Grateful Dead there has always been a certain percentage of the population who have found deep meaning in improvisational rock music. With the death of Jerry Garcia the torch was passed to a new generation of musicians and fans who continue this legacy through Phish and Widespread Panic. The Melody of Motion is able to do what no other book has been able to do: explain in depth why people forsake their jobs, families, and responsibilities to cross a continent following these bands. The story follows Melody, a young woman intent on living her life to the fullest, as she discovers Phish and Widespread Panic. The music and the people she meets effect the rest of her life. This is not the story of the bands, but of the people living their lives in the parking lots. The story is filled with colorful characters one is likely to meet on tour and the insane episodes everyone who has been to one of these concerts can relate to.

Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307476863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die. "It may be nonfiction, but Into the Wild is a mystery of the highest order." —Entertainment Weekly McCandess had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Not long after, he was dead. Into the Wild is the mesmerizing, heartbreaking tale of an enigmatic young man who goes missing in the wild and whose story captured the world’s attention. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

Author: Lars Eighner
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 146683644X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets that has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years “When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand.” Containing the widely anthologized essay “On Dumpster Diving,” Travels with Lizbeth is a beautifully written account of one man’s experience of homelessness, a story of physical survival, and the triumph of the artistic spirit in the face of enormous adversity. In his unique voice—dry, disciplined, poignant, comic—Eighner celebrates the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounts their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and hitchhiking along the highways to Southern California and back. “Lars Eighner is the Thoreau of the Dumpsters. Comparisons to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Hamsun’s Hunger leap to mind. A classic of down-and-out literature.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis “Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul...A literate and exceedingly humane document.”—The New York Times

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road “In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur “reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.”

Author: Jenny Lawson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0425261018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Author: Robert Moor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476739234
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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"In 2009, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet: How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others fade? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Over the course of the next seven years, Moor traveled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing--combining the nomadic joys of Peter Matthiessen with the eclectic wisdom of Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Throughout, Moor reveals how this single topic--the oft-overlooked trail--sheds new light on a wealth of age-old questions: How does order emerge out of chaos? How did animals first crawl forth from the seas and spread across continents? How has humanity's relationship with nature and technology shaped the world around us? And, ultimately, how does each of us pick a path through life? With a breathtaking arc that spans from the dawn of animal life to the digital era, On Trails is a book that makes us see our world, our history, our species, and our ways of life anew"--Book jacket flap.

Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613747217
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Winner of the 2014 National Outdoor Book Awards for History/Biography Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it." Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction. Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewood's own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: Why did she do it? The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire readers of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination. Even those who know of Gatewood don't know the full story—a story of triumph from pain, rebellion from brutality, hope from suffering.

Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142001745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

Author: Niviaq Korneliussen
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Five friends attempt to find themselves in the nightlife of Greenland’s capital city in this “audacious and honest, sorrowful and triumphant” debut novel (NPR). In a collection of blurry nights and bleary mornings after, Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen weaves together the coming of age of five young people in the city of Nuuk. Fia has recently sworn off men only to discover that the woman she wants is unavailable. Her brother Inuk is forced to escape Greenland after being implicated in a political scandal. Arnaq struggles to cope with her past as her hard-partying life spirals out of control. Meanwhile, Ivik and Sara must confront an important transition in their relationship. With vibrant imagery and daring prose, Korneliussen creates a Greenlandic literature unlike any we have known before—young, urbane, stream-of-consciousness, studded with textspeak and delirious with nightlife. This inventive debut “transports us to a cold homeland where the blood runs hot” (Guardian, UK).