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978-0-89587-187-9
0-89587-187-4
$19.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
402 pages
black-and-white photographs, map, bibliography, index
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Brad Herzog has
taken a unique idea and developed it into an interesting volume.
--Walter Cronkite
States of Mind is
an intoxicating odyssey down the Great American Road. Brad Herzog--a
postmodern Whitmanesque seeker--guides the reader to forgotten U.S.
hamlets where the power of history and tradition have endured. A
terrific book!" --Douglas Brinkley, author of The Majic Bus:
An American Odyssey
This isn't 1964, and these
aren't the Merry Pranksters.
By age 27, Brad Herzog was a
published author. He was well educated, newly married, upwardly mobile,
the product of a good family. But when he took stock of himself, he saw
someone trading a life for a living, a chronicler of the world whose
universe was a view of a Chicago parking lot.
He was a cynic, and he
wondered why. Did he and Generation X represent America as it approached
the millennium, or did they merely misjudge it? Herzog believed the
answer could be found far from the headlines and talk shows, in the
nooks and crannies of the nation. So he and his wife, Amy, emptied their
bank account, compacted their lives into a 34-foot Winnebago, and set a
course for America.
States of Mind is the
account of their 10-month philosophical, historical, and conversational
journey across the country. What began as a literal search for the small
places on the map turned into a figurative examination of the small
places of the heart, a quest for virtues lost amid negativity and
disillusionment.
Is there harmony in Harmony,
California? Is there honor in Honor, Michigan? The mission was a search
for answers.
Their travels took them to
Triumph, Louisiana, where they discovered a community twice destroyed by
hurricanes and twice rebuilt. In Justice, West Virginia, they found half
a population descended from the Hatfields and the McCoys. Hope,
Mississippi, near the site of the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney, offered a mixed bag of reflections on America's racial divide.
States of Mind is a
four-hour sail with storyteller Bill Zuber in Friendship, Maine. It is a
bear hug and a two-hour diatribe from six-foot-eight, 340-pound
"Chicken" Owen Foster in Pride, Alabama. It is a hailstorm, a
grasshopper plague, and a debate with a priest and a pastor in Faith,
South Dakota.
It is a book that conjures
the humor of Travels with Charley, the generational angst of On
the Road, the introspection of Blue Highways. But having
grown from that tradition, it is finally a journey all its own.
about the author
Brad Herzog is a graduate of Cornell University and a former
newspaper reporter. He is the author of The Sports 100, a
two-time CASE award winner for educational feature writing, and a
frequent contributor to various national magazines. He and his wife Amy
live on California's central coast.
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