Harley-Davidson bikers ? Grand Canyon river rats ? Mormon archaeologists ? Spelling bee prodigies ? For more than fifteen years, the bestselling, award-winning author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture.

This sparkling mosaic of our country, in all its wild and poignant charm, "may be the best road trip you'll ever take -- full of strange vision, hilarious detours, and sudden beauty in unlikely places" (The New Yorker).

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 Sides' 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.

• We started tracking this book on October 9, 2010.
• This book was $9.29 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 97 times in the past 5,323 days.
• The current price of this book is $5.99 last checked one day ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $4.99.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on October 12, 2024.
• This book has been $4.99 4 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on April 20, 2025.
• This book has been $14.99 7 times since we started tracking it.

• Politics & Social SciencesSocial SciencesAnthropologyCultural
• TravelTravel Writing

• Publication Date: December 18, 2007
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 466 Pages
• File Size: 14 KB