Premise of the book: In 1973, fresh out of college and disillusioned with the world he found himself in, Peter Jenkins decided to walk across America. He took along a fifty-pound backpack and his best friend, an Alaskan malamute named Cooper. This book (it turns out) is just the first half of his travels - from New York to New Orleans, a journey which took two years.
Random Facts Learned By Reading This Book:
- One of the places Jenkins visited was a hippie commune in Tennessee named the Farm. Its leader was Stephen Gaskin, and the people who lived there worked together to farm hundreds of acres of land. Jenkins spent several weeks there.
- The Appalachian Mountains have more varieties of plants than grow in all of Europe.
- Winston County, Alabama, seceded from the Confederacy during the Civil War. They didn't own any slaves, so they didn't see the need to put their lives in danger for a cause they didn't believe in.
- It's a rather short list of facts, because listing facts was not really the aim of this book. It focused more on the people Jenkins met.
General thoughts on the book: It took me a little while to get into this book. The focus on people and experiences, rather than information about each location, was not exactly what I was looking for in my last book for my Circumreading the World challenge. But once I came to terms with what this book was trying to accomplish, I ended up enjoying it. Walking across America is a tall order, and Jenkins accomplished it well. He gave every person and every place a chance to prove themselves, and so many of them took him pleasantly by surprise. This sort of open-mindedness is needed in this country more than ever, and Jenkins provides a good role model as he tells of his experiences across America.
RSS Feed
