American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes,...

American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and ... | Richard Grant | Strategic Wanderlust

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American Nomads: T...

	American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and ... Richard Grant Grove Press, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fascinated by the land of endless horizons, sunshine, and the open road, Richard Grant spent fifteen years wandering throughout the United States, never spending more than three weeks in one place and getting to know America's nomads, truckers, tramps, rodeo cowboys, tie-dyed concert followers, flea market traders, retirees who live year round in their RVs, and the murderous Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA). In a richly comic travelogue, Grant uses these lives and his own to examine the myths and realities of the wandering life and its contradiction with the sedentary American dream. Along with a personal account, American Nomads traces the history of wandering in the New World, through vividly told stories of frontiersmen, fur trappers and cowboys, Comanche and Apache warriors, all the way back to the first Spanish explorers who crossed the continent. What unites these disparate characters, as they range back and forth across the centuries, is a stubborn conviction that the only true freedom is to roam across the land.

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Excellent Book

This was a fascinating, wonderful book. I learned so much about the people who live on the road, folks most of us don't know exist. Grants explores all kinds of different groups, from hippies to cowboys to rail riders to tramps. He even throws in the RV senior citizen crowd (though they don't seem to fit in, even though they fit the definition; I guess he felt he couldn't overlook them, but I would have rather he did). His history of past American nomads was fascinating. There are just so many elements he covers in this book, as well as all the issues these nomads face (e.g. how do you deal with having no woman in your life?).

I disagree with another reviewer who thought Grant was using the book as a way to brag about his own life. The bits about his own life are understated, if anything. And the research he's done, the groups of people he's hung out with, is impressive. I knew nothing about the Rainbow Gathering, so this was very interesting. And the mindset of some road tramps--where they don't want to accumulate money, so they give it away when they come upon a large amount--was very illuminating.

In all, I thought he covered this topic very well, showed nomadism from a variety of perspectives and delved deeply into many of the issues surrounding it.

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Strategic Wanderlust

A great first book. American Nomads is a true outsider's depiction of the idiosyncratic modern ways of America contrasted with its nomadic history.
And coming from an unknown British writer, it is refreshing not to have a high-falutin', supercilious attitude coming at you in the writing.

What you get here are historical stories about nomads such as Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, the Apaches, the Comanches, Joseph Walker (mountain man) and Everett Ruess alternating with contemporary episodics of bullriders, truckers, senior RV'ers, and weekend mountain men.

If you need any reason to laugh uncontrollably, Grant gives it to you with his story of a psycho hitchhiker named BJ who is the definition of misanthropic (Chapter 3) and a hippie named Medicine Wing who, through his LSD-induced fireside dance-tranze, achieves nirvana at the Rainbow Gathering (Chapter 9).

Reading this book is an adventure, even if the one who reads it is but a vicarious nomad. Highly recommended.

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

The Cloud Reckoner

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Compliments from a "sedentary"

I absolutely adored this book. It's like a halfway-boutique history that doesn't claim to be one, and as such it can get away with the halfway part. Grant explores the dirty, the grimy, and the repulsive, as well as the beutiful and the mundane. You'll fall in love with this book because Grant's love of the road is palpable, and what he does best in this work is communicate the sense of possibility that is inherent in the road.

One thing that I found disappointing as a historian was his lack of references. I would have loved to have seen detailed footnotes/endnotes for the material that he dug up. He is, however, working with his own experiences as well as the oral histories of others, so for the most part, there is little to reference.

SPOILER ALERT BELOW!

One thing I didn't quite get was his statement at the end where he equated the founding of the major religions by desert wanderers with the focus on heaven-borne deities. I thought that link was absurdly weak, and it soured the book for me at the end. That said, I would recommend this text 1000 times over, and in fact, will be giving it as a gift to several people this holiday season.

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Worth buying, worth reading

The subtitle really gives you an idea about the subjects covered in this book. The author talks about all kinds of nomadic people from colonial explorers to Dead Heads, old Indian tribes to their modern descendants, Cowboys, serial hitchhikers, pioneers, and RVers. The book is basically a series of unrelated stories, tied together by the fact that they all deal with nomads.

Some sections start to drag a little bit. Even if some parts of it are a little immature, as one reviewer pointed out, (Drunken rodeo cowboys running out of a convenience store with a twelve pack, jumping through a car window and speeding off, for example), it still held my interest. I thought it was interesting that this is all non-fiction-- there actually are people who live on the road for their whole lives.

Throughout the book, there are parts that are more than just observation of how things are. The author gives background information, both historical and character. He does a little bit of analysis at times. He gives a lot of commentary, both his own and that of the people he meets, about the viewpoint nomads have.

This book can also serve as a launching point for further reading. I've read Cabeza de Vaca's book about his travels in the Southwest, and I'm planning on eventually buying the biography of Joe Walker, the unsung mountain man/fur trader/explorer extraordinaire. Point is, there's a good bibliography if you wanted to go deeper into some of the characters in this book.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (the hobo, explorer, minimalist, hit the road and don't look back kind of thing, that is), I'd really reccomend this book. I haven't even had it for a year yet, and I've read it at least four or five times (partially because I'm too cheap to buy a new book, but mostly because I just think it so dang interesting).

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history

Great modern insight into early explorers and the nomad habits and life of the early indians,also the fallout from the hippy era.those who never left it and became nomads of the road
Great read from a Pom [prisoner of mother england ] whos'ancestors have been wandering the world for generations.
Peter

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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