American Nomad
Part memoir and part road movie, wracked by pop dreams and apocalyptic reveries, from the techno-pyramids of Las Vegas to the ancient Indian pyramids of a lost America buried in the Midwest, the narrator roams a republic in revolt against itself — until he finally meets, in a car wreck outside Chicago, the most nomadic American of all.
"A beautiful, crazed and weirdly patriotic book." Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review
"Sharp-witted, brutally candid and wryly humorous, Erickson's intricate panorama pulls no punches." Booklist
"Part rant and part serious analysis, often hysterically funny, American Nomad argues in a variety of ways that we have sold our Jeffersonian birthright for a mess of pottage. If American Nomad ranges widely and wildly, Erickson's saga operates brilliantly as both political chronicle and zany memoir." Kirkus
"His conception of the fluidity of time and history and man's place in them is startlingly original, and he writes with the force and vividness of a winter storm." Atlanta Journal Constitution
"As good in his way as Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, the nomadic Erickson is the reader's Virgil in a cross between the Inferno and Hellzapoppin." Library Journal
"American Nomad deserves to be compared with the best journalism of Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, yet Erickson's style is less self-indulgent, less overwhelmed by the observing author's persona. Remarkably insightful, sharply funny, complex and provocative, American Nomad rates a space on the short shelf of books about politics and life at the end of the Twentieth Century." Review of Contemporary Fiction
|