A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow

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.

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"I first saw America on July 1, 1973. I flew over on a charter flight full of students...all of us drawn toward America like dazzled, half-blind moths, seduced by a vast poster...of a Greyhound bus whose destination board bore a single word that encompassed the infinite adventure of America, its wild past, its endless plains, its mystery: BUFFALO." So he was hooked from the very start. By the end of that fateful summer, young British expatriate Tim Brookes had hitchhiked to California and Vancouver, back across Canada and down to New York. Now, twenty five years later, he's back on the road. But he's got a lot more on his mind these days. Artfully weaving between past and present, Brookes considers exactly why the proverbial road trip, once a crucial part of American youth education, seems to have all but disappeared, superceded by more expensive and less uncertain kinds of travel. Joining a venerable literary tradition that includes Huck Finn, Steinbeck's beloved Charlie, and Kerouac, Brookes's hilarious and strangely moving "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" is a brilliant enquiry into America's peculiar relationship with the open road.