Road Angels: Searching For Home Down America's Coast of Dreams
Bestselling author and native Minnesotan Nerburn (Simple Truths)  navigates the West Coast from Washington to California. "[N]o  divorce, no loss of job, no dramatic crisis of faith and  self-confidence" led Nerburn away from his home in beautiful,  isolated northern Minnesota, and his wife and his 10-year-old  son, only a sense that the West Coast is his old lover: "Until I  put her out of my mind... I'll never be at peace with this cold  outpost that we now call home." Revisiting his young-adult  haunts of 20 years ago, he hunts "street-level experience the  ordinary people, the casual encounters, the ad hoc turns and  serendipitous decisions." In various encounters a Native  American, a student hitchhiker, a log-truck driver Nerburn  captures the vocal and narrative styles of people who otherwise  seem like caricatures (noble Native, ditzy student, gruff  worker). Though he wants to explore "the myth of the West and  the road" via these voices, for the book's first two-thirds he  ruminates interminably on the misery of the trip. Cogent  insights into 1960s counterculture's smalltown legacies ("Their  mendicant lifestyle has been reduced to a pauper's huddling  inside of half-finished huts") are overwhelmed by facile  observations ("cities... feel like places where will and  ambition matter more than sensitivity and compassion").  Nerburn's ingenuousness at the West's many changes including one  improbable moment when he doesn't understand the ordering box in  a fast-food drive-through lane smacks of pretense when one knows  that he maintains his own Web site (www.kentnerburn.com). In the  last third, he forsakes his midlife crisis for a tough, tight  account of a day in wealthy, suburban Mill Valley and  politicized Berkeley and Oakland's mean streets, finally  achieving the immediacy and palpability he seeks. 6-city West  Coast author tour; 15-city NPR tour. (June)Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.