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A charming mix of how-to, RR love and operation. Short of the "bible," Armstong's The Railroad--What It Is..., this is the best work on the history, development, use and function of track, rolling stock, signals that we've found outside the textbooks. Jargon is explained (including a 45 p. glossary). Fine, fun, informative book. Published by Sand River Press, 1319 14th Street, Los Osos, CA 93402. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Through letters and photographs, profiles teenagers who hopped the freight trains during the Great Depression in order to find adventure, seek employment, or escape poverty.
Hopping a freight in the St. Louis rail yards, Ted Conover0́4winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award0́4embarks on his dream trip, traveling the rails with "the knights of the road." Equipped with rummage store clothing, a bedroll, and his notebooks, Conover immerses himself in the peculiar culture of the hobo, where handshakes and intoductions are foreign, but where everyone knows where the Sally (Salvation Army) and the Willy (Goodwill) are. Along the way he encounters unexpected charity (a former cop goes out of his way to offer Conover a dollar) and indignities (what do you do when there are no public bathrooms?) and learns how to survive on the road.But above all, Conover gets to know the men and women who, for one reason or another, live this life. There's Lonny, who accepts that there are some towns he can't enter before dark because he's black, and Pistol Pete, a cowboy who claims his son is a doctor and his daughter a ballerina, and Sheba Sheila Sheils, who's built herself a house out of old tires. By turns resourceful and desperate, generous and mistrusting, independent and communal, philosophical and profoundly cynical, the tramps Conover meets show him a segment of humanity outside society, neither wholly romantic nor wholly tragic, and very much like the rest of us.
The unforgettable story of one woman who leaves behind her hardscrabble childhood in Alaska to travel the country via freight train—a beautiful memoir about forgiveness, self-discovery, and the redemptive power of nature, perfect for fans of Wild or Educated. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER • “An urgent read. A courageous life. Quinn’s story burns through us and bleeds beauty on every page.”—Noé Álvarez, author of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, with a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood. The Sunset Route is a powerful and brazenly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States—in the Alaskan cold, on trains rattling through forests and deserts, as well as in low-income apartments and crowded punk houses—following a remarkable protagonist who has witnessed more tragedy than she thought she could ever endure and who must learn to heal her own heart. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the natural world as a spiritual anchor, and on the ways that forgiveness can set us free.
Garrison Keillor meets Jack Kerouac meets Mahatma Gandhi in this wry, roadwise scripture. Hobo Sapien is a series of freight train parables born out of the author's twelve-plus years riding freight trains, combined with lessons learned in his seven-year stint as a Self-Realization Fellowship monk, plus the added bonus of fascinating railroad history. Non-fiction readers buy books to learn something, for reference, or to be entertained. Hobo Sapien fills all three bills. Readers will get a unique immersion into the underground world of the hobo. The spiritual takes are written with a subtle humor that helps the medicine go down. It is not your parent's self-help book.Armchair adventurers, rail fans, spiritual seekers, and academia nuts will all gather intriguing information from this missive. It is vastly different from other hobo books because of its unparalleled combination of adventure, rail history, humor, and spirituality. The author's background is also unique and varied. Not many hobos have gone from Yale to rail or from hunk to monk.
Tenaya has never left Yosemite Valley. He was born in a car by the Merced River, and grew up in a hidden camp with his parents, surviving on fish, acorns, and unfinished food thrown away by the park's millions of tourists. But despite its splendor, Tenaya's Yosemite is a visceral place of opposites, at once beautiful, dangerous, and violent. When he meets Lucy, a young woman from the south side of the park, Tenaya must choose between this new relationship and the Valley, terrorism and legend, the sacred versus the material. In this modern retelling of Samson and Delilah, Graphic the Valley explores mythical strength, worldly greed, love, lust, and epic destruction. Set entirely in the majestic Yosemite Valley, Hoffmeister recalls Edward Abbey's vivid sense of place and urgent call for preservation of one of the world's most spectacular sites.
The true story of a boy who sets out with absolutely nothing to find his mother who went to the US from Honduras to look for work.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls. T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself. As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery. All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find. T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut. Now a major motion picture directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Kyle Catlett and Helena Bonham Carter.