PLACES IN BETWEEN

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Mike Bryan

The ultimate road book, and arguably the finest, Uneasy Rider forgoes the traditional blue highways and scenic nooks and crannies left behind in America's tidal wake, and travels instead on six-lane blacktop into the heart of our society today. With Mike Bryan you're in the company of an adept listener and a funny, learned, and profoundly sympathetic man. His chosen beat stretches west from Texas to New Mexico and Arizona toward the City of Angels in the Golden State - the chimerical destination of any decent American pilgrim. Along the way he uncovers much that is new and revelatory about our nation and fellow citizens, a hard-working, various lot including snake ranchers and state troopers, truckers and hitchhikers, motel-keepers and visionaries large and small. Fair hearing is given to one and all, whether wheeler-dealers, immigrants, border smugglers, or people who became near-aboriginals when the interstate turned Route 66 into outback. And between these encounters Bryan contemplates history, both public - pioneering, roadmaking, assassination theories at Dealey Plaza, the oil business, agriculture, waste-dumping, gambling, you name it - and personal. The Bryan family comes from rural Texas, after all, though an ambivalent rootlessness has marked Bryan's own life - and is also, some claim, a defining characteristic for much of the population.

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Edmund White

**From Amazon.com:** “One has the impression, reading *The Flâneur*, of having fallen into the hands of a highly distractible, somewhat eccentric poet and professor who is determined to show you a Paris you wouldn’t otherwise see…Edmund White tells such a good story that I’m ready to listen to anything he wants to talk about.”—*New York Times Book Review* A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through city streets in search of adventure and fulfillment. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. In the hands of the learned White, a walk through Paris is both a tour of its lush, sometimes prurient history and an evocation of the city’s spirit. The Flâneur leads us to bookshops and boutiques, monuments and palaces, giving us a glimpse into the inner human drama. Along the way we learn everything from the latest debates among French lawmakers to the juicy details of Colette’s life.

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Peter Genovese

"U.S. 1 runs through Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Miami, in addition to Caribou, Maine; Quonochontaug, Rhode Island; and Alma, Georgia.". "Genovese spent two years on U.S. 1, talking to everyone from doughnut makers, dolphin trainers, and swamp guides to real Miami vice cops and the keeper of the National Parasite Collection. With his unerring eye for detail, sense of humor, and understanding of human nature, Genovese takes readers on a sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always illuminating 2,450-mile journey from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida."--BOOK JACKET.

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Allen Abel

For his third book, Allen Abel, at the age of forty-three, decided to do a very daring thing - even for a journalist and foreign correspondent. He would move home to Brooklyn, live with his mother (in the same apartment in which he spent his childhood), and explore and write about the borough of his birth. Accompanied sporadically by his thirty-something sister, known affectionately as "Little Debbie," he spent several months wandering along Flatbush Avenue, the thoroughfare that runs like a spine through Brooklyn - from the Manhattan Bridge all the way to a national park on the salt-water shore. The result is a delightful family memoir and exploration of a unique borough by a wryly humorous observer with an eye for an unforgettable character and an ear for a good story. He hobnobs with Mohawk high-steel workers, tries to learn voodoo secrets from Haitian immigrants, commiserates with policemen detailed to the subway (also known as "The Beast") or with beleaguered shopkeepers, and chats with an ex-zookeeper in Prospect Park. He revisits the scenes of his childhood, samples social life in distant Flatlands, and hunts for horseshoe crabs on the shoreline. He is a constant source of entertainment. . Flatbush Odyssey is a revelation - as are all fine travel books - and in it Allen Abel has produced a marvellous piece of storytelling. It is sure to appeal even to those benighted few who have never set foot in Brooklyn.