Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier
Written by Hampton Sides
Narrated by Kris Koscheski
4/5
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About this audiobook
In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of an apparent cabal of fabulously powerful military-industrialists, drop in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and join a giant techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a diverse gallery of American visionaries-from the impossibly perky founder of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell Means to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the route of the historic Bataan Death March with veterans from Sides's acclaimed World War II epic, Ghost Soldiers. Americana gives us a sparkling mosaic of our country today, in all its wild and poignant charm.
Hampton Sides
Narrative historian Hampton Sides is the New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground. He is a contributing editor to Outside magazine and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other publications. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, and he is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award for feature writing. Hellhound on His Trail, about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hunt for his killer, was the basis for the acclaimed PBS documentary Roads to Memphis. Sides lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Reviews for Americana
20 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some of these essays by Hampton Sides were riveting. "A Murder in Falkner" is an engrossing story of true crime. Other essays, like the opening essay about Tony Hawk, are worth skipping. Definitely take a look at this book if you are interested in American culture, but feel free to pick and choose what interests you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved this book, from essays about Airstream trailer road clubs to a bass fisherman tournament; left on my own to seek out reading material, I would have sought out nary a one. The author can write and I once again find myself following a good writer wherever he takes me like a loyal dog.