Only In America How I Discovered America A Twenty Year Journey

Chronicling an extensive travel history throughout the United States, Bill Bird takes us with him on an eye-opening and thoroughly entertaining journey in Only In America. This is a book brimming with all possibilities for unanticipated experiences, unique discoveries, and engaging edification while traveling across the country. From its iconic cities to its stunning landscapes, Only In America encourages the armchair traveler to put aside any preconceived notions of the United States and pack their bags for a marvelous and fulfilling time.

In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.

The plan was simple. Go to America. Buy a second-hand car. Drive coast-to-coast without giving any money to The ManTM. What could possibly go wrong? Dismayed by the relentless onslaught of faceless American chains muscling in where local businesses had once thrived, Dave Gorman set off on the ultimate American road trip - in search of the true, independent heart of the U S of A. He would eat cherry pie from local diners, re-fuel at dusty gas stations and stock up on supplies from Mom and Pop's grocery store. At least that was the idea. But when did you last see an independent gas station? Gamely, Dave beds down in a Colorado trailer park, sleeps in an Oregon forest treehouse, and even spends Thanksgiving with a Mexican family in Kansas. But when his road trip mutates into an odyssey of near-epic proportions and he finds himself being threatened at gun point in Mississippi, Dave starts to worry about what's going to break down next. The car... or him?

Ride along with author Tom Cotter and photographer Michael Alan Ross as they pilot their Ford Bronco/Airstream Basecamp combination 8,881 miles along the lower 48’s back roads and byways. Tom Cotter has spent decades ferreting out lost “barn find” collector cars. The process has made him an ardent road tripper, logging thousands of miles every year on America’s back roads. Previous journeys have traced Route 66 in his 1939 Ford Woody wagon and followed the Lincoln highway coast to coast behind the wheel of a 1926 Model T. Cotter’s journeys led him to wonder: What could be the most epic American road trip? The answer: Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, its thousands of miles recounted in America’s Greatest Road Trip. Cotter and Ross drove across the country, through British Columbia and the Yukon, and finally through Alaska to the literal end of the road. Ross documented their road time in thousands of photographs. Along the way, the pair met fellow road trippers, adventurers, small-town Americans, world travelers, and rolled through an ever-changing geography from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi Delta to the Great Plains and Mountain states through the Northwest Passage and finally several hundred miles of Alaska’s challenging ALCAN Highway. Cotter’s observations of Two-Lane America are complemented by Ross’s beautiful photography capturing both the sweep and the detail of life off the beaten path. Join them on their once-in-a-lifetime journey—you’ll be glad you came along for the ride.

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America. Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war. Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville's Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.

Ilhan Omar's career is a collection of historic firsts: she is the first refugee, the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the United States Congress. Against a xenophobic and divisive administration, she has risen to global fame as a powerful voice in the Democratic Party's new progressive chorus of congresswomen of colour.'This Is What America Looks Like' is a tale of the aspirations, disappointments, successes and surprises in the life of an immigrant and Muslim in the US today. This is Omar's story told on her own terms: from a childhood in Mogadishu and four long years at a Kenyan refugee camp, to her arrival in America--penniless and speaking only Somali--and her triumphant election to the US House of Representatives.In the face of merciless slander and constant attacks from opponents in both parties, Omar continues to speak up for her beliefs. Courageous, hopeful and defiant, her memoir is marked by her irrepressible spirit, even in the darkest of times.

This book critically examines how movies that feature real or imagined explorers and expeditions creatively feature the geography of Latin America. It focuses on how locales are scripted into film plots and artistically depicted, and demonstrates that place is as important as any character in a film, especially in this genre. Nineteen key films are analyzed. Some, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Other Conquest, Embrace of the Serpent, and The Lost City of Z are based on the exploits of real explorers. Others are fictional, including Apocalypto, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Dora and the Lost City of Gold. The author also discusses the evolution of exploration-discovery films, including trends that will likely be found in forthcoming movies.