Americana Dispatches from the New Frontier

Name: Americana Dispatches from the New Frontier
Price: 5.95 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9781400033553

ISBN-10: 1400033551

ISBN-13: 9781400033553

Edition: 2004

Authors: Hampton Sides

List price: $19.00

30 day, 100% satisfaction guarantee!

Buy new: $14.19

Marketplace

5 new & used from $5.95

what's this?

Rush Rewards U
Members Receive:

You have reached 400 XP and carrot coins. That is the daily max!

Description:

Harley-Davidson bikers . . . Grand Canyon river rats. . .Mormon archaeologists. . . Spelling bee prodigies'8230; For more than fifteen years, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. Reporting for Outside, The New Yorker, and NPR, among other national media, the award-winning journalist has established a reputation not only as a wry observer of the contemporary American scene but also as one of our more inventive and versatile practitioners of narrative non-fiction. 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 Sides7; acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost Soldiers. Sides also examines the nation that has emerged from the ashes of September 11, recounting the harrowing journeys of three World Trade Center survivors and deciding at the last possible minute not to "embed" on the Iraqi front-lines with the U.S. Marines. Americana gives us a sparkling mosaic of our country today, in all its wild and poignant charm. Experience the many faces of America with Hampton Sides as he: AMERICAN ORIGINALS . . . drops in on the charmed life of skateboarding icon Tony Hawk; studies counter-terrorism at the G. Gordon Liddy spy school; goes Hollywood with American Indian Movement radical-turned-movie-star Russell Means; steps out of the closet with Mel White, religious right ghostwriter-turned-gay activist; mushes the Iditarod Trail with Alaska legend Joe Redington. AMERICAN EDENS . . . runs the rapids during a man-made flood in the Grand Canyon; crashes the redwood retreat of California7;s elite Bohemian Club; debriefs the 0;bio-nauts1; as they emerge from captivity in the Biosphere; dives into America7;s greatest swimming hole; gets ecstatic with the Zippies at their secret all-night techno-rave. AMERICAN RIDES . . . ponders silver bubbles at the annual Airstream RV convention; revs it up at the Harley-Davidson rally in Sturgis, South Dakota; sails the Chesapeake with snooty owners of a rare antique sailboat known as the log canoe; roams the streets with D.C.7;s hard-core band of bike couriers. AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF . . . . . . speaks in tongues with black Pentecostalists of the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ; fishes for lunkers at the Bassmasters Classic; goes underground with the world7;s greatest cave rescuer; unravels the mystery of a notorious teen murder in rural Mississippi. AMERICANS ABROAD . . . crosses the Sahara Desert with American endurance runners at the infernal Marathon des Sables; bushwhacks through MesoAmerica with Mormon archaeologists in search of lost tribes of Israel; visits a high school friend who7;s become an Uzi-toting Zionist pioneer in the West Bank; walks the route of the Bataan Death March with characters from Ghost Soldiers. AMERICAN OBSESSIONS . . . cranks it up with high-end stereophiles at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas; gets bowled over by 5,000 squealing salesladies at the annual Tupperware convention; plumbs the mysteries of the "schwa" at the National Spelling Bee; scrapes at the stucco of the neurotic arc

Book details

List price: $19.00
Copyright year: 2004
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 4/13/2004
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 464
Size: 5.20" wide x 7.94" long x 1.04" tall
Weight: 0.748
Language: English

Hampton Sides, contributing editor of "Outside" & editor of "The Wild File," is also the author of "Ghost Soldiers". He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.



Introduction


The birdman drops in


Waiting for Liddy


Chief without Indians


The gay eminence


The toughest guy in Alaska


And the bureaucrats said, let there be high water


In darkest Bohemia


Mystery! Science! Theater!


Panther falls


Smells like zippy spirit


The silver city


Woodstock in leathers


Waterlogged


Blazing saddles


Jerusalem on the Mississippi


Let us now praise famous fish


Crawl space


A murder in Falkner


Baked


This is not the place


Baruch


Ghosts of Bataan


Chasing the white witch


Sisters of the bowl


Webster's children


At home in a fake place


Points of impact


Among the Kawasaki Republicans


Unembedded


First


Acknowledgments