Carsick
Carsick

Author: John Waters

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0374709300

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Carsick is the New York Times bestselling chronicle of a cross-country hitchhiking journey with America's most beloved weirdo. John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin mustache, and a cardboard sign that reads "I'm Not Psycho," he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash? Before he leaves for this bizarre adventure, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road? His real-life rides include a gentle eighty-one-year-old farmer who is convinced Waters is a hobo, an indie band on tour, and the perverse filmmaker's unexpected hero: a young, sandy-haired Republican in a Corvette. Laced with subversive humor and warm intelligence, Carsick is an unforgettable vacation with a wickedly funny companion—and a celebration of America's weird, astonishing, and generous citizenry.

Roadside Americans
Roadside Americans

Author: Jack Reid

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1469655012

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White House, the youthful faces on the road chasing the ghost of Jack Kerouac were largely gone—along with sympathetic portrayals of the practice in state legislatures and the media. In Roadside Americans, Jack Reid traces the rise and fall of hitchhiking, offering vivid accounts of life on the road and how the act of soliciting rides from strangers, and the attitude toward hitchhikers in American society, evolved over time in synch with broader economic, political, and cultural shifts. In doing so, Reid offers insight into significant changes in the United States amid the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Reagan Era.

Hitchhiking Across America
Hitchhiking Across America

Author: Doug Van Gorder

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Published: 2009-07-19

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 143271967X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Today I will hope for a ride This is how I survive I need to bury my pride And pray to God I stay alive.

Hitchhike America
Hitchhike America

Author: Jon Lott

Publisher: Ajax Publishing

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781732583108

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hitchhike America honestly recounts the humorous, adventure-filled, and unforgettable journey made by Jon Lott as he hitchhiked west across the United States.

Walking to Listen
Walking to Listen

Author: Andrew Forsthoefel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1632867001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn’t know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it’s the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.

A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow
A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow

Author: Tim Brookes

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780792277293

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A noted cultural critic and NPR essayist offers a lively and provocative account of his hitchhiking odyssey across the United States, documenting his experiences along the way and reexamining America's onetime love affair with the road trip. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Redwood to Deadwood
Redwood to Deadwood

Author: Colin Flaherty

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9781477674055

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A 53-year old dude hitchhikes across America. Again. "Great guy. Great Book." NPR Top Adventure Travel Book -- About.com "Best travel since On The Road. Maybe best hitchhiking book ever." hitchwiki.com

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Author: Tom Robbins

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2003-06-17

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0553897896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.

Interstate
Interstate

Author: Julian Sayarer

Publisher: Arcadia Books

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781910050934

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Recruited to work on a big documentary project, Julian goes to New York convinced he has hit big time at last. Finding the project cancelled he wanders the city streets and hitchhiking to San Francisco slowly starts to seem like the most sensible option for his career as a travel writer.The story finds an unseen America in rough shape; Julian meets a place of Interstates, forgotten towns and food deserts, always grappling with the scale and energy of the US. Julian tells a tale of Steinbeck, Kerouac and the vast, thundering indifference of American geography and culture at the start of a new century.