On My Radar:

The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America
by Tom Zoellner
Counterpoint Press
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

“How was it possible, I wondered, that all of this American land––in every direction––could be fastened together into a whole?”

What does it mean when a nation accustomed to moving begins to settle down, when political discord threatens unity, and when technology disrupts traditional ways of building communities? Is a shared soil enough to reinvigorate a national spirit?

From the embaattled newsrooms of small town newspapers to the pornography film sets of the Los Angeles basin, from the check–out lanes of Dollar General to the holy sites of Mormonism, from the nation’s highest peaks to the razed remains of a cherished home, like a latter–day Woody Guthrie, Tom Zoellner takes to the highways and byways of a vast land in search of the soul of its people.

By turns nostalgic and probing, incisive and enraged, Zoellner’s reflections reveal a nation divided by faith, politics, and shifting economies, but––more importantly––one united by a shared sense of ownership in the common land.

On My Radar:

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
by Robert Michael Pyle
Counterpoint Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Where Bigfoot Walks is a spectacular, moving, and witty narrative exploration of not only the phenomenon of Bigfoot, but also the human need to believe that something is out there beyond the campfire, and that wildness remains as well.

Awarded a Guggenheim to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Robert Pyle trekked into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovered both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. He searched out Indians who told him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully evolved into humans. He attended Sasquatch Daze, where he met scientists, hunters, and others who have devoted their lives to the search, and realized that “these guys don’t want to find Bigfoot—they want to be Bigfoot!” A handful of open-minded biologists and anthropologists countered the tabloids he studied, while rogue Forest Service employees and loggers swore of an industry conspiracy to deep-six accounts of unknown, upright hominoid apes among us.

In the end, Pyle concludes that if we can hang on to a sizeable hunk of Bigfoot habitat, we will at least have a fragment of the greatest green treasure the temperate world has ever known. If we do not, Bigfoot, real or imagined, will vanish; and with it will flee the others who dwell in that world. “Looking at that tangled land,” he writes, “one can just about accept that Sasquatch could coexist with towns and loggers and hunters and hikers, all in proportion. But when the topography is finally tamed outright, no one will anymore imagine that giants are abroad on the land.”

In the years since publication, the author’s fresh experiences and finds—detailed in an all-new chapter which includes an evaluation of recent DNA evidence from Bigfoot hair and scat, the study of speech phonemes in the “Sierra Sounds” purported Bigfoot recordings, Pyle’s examination of the impact of the wildly popular Animal Planet series Bigfoot Hunters, the reemergence of the famous Bob Gimlin into the Bigfoot community, and more—have kept his own mind wide open to one of the biggest questions in the land.

On My Radar:*

If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir
by Jessica Hendry Nelson
Counterpoint Press
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

If Only You People Could Follow Directions is a spellbinding debut that reimagines the memoir in Jessica Hendry Nelson’s thoroughly original voice. In these linked essays, Nelson’s fearless writing and hypnotic storytelling centers on the story of three people: Nelson’s mother susan, her brother eric, and Jessica herself. These three characters are deeply bound to one another, not just by the usual ties of blood and family, but also by a mother’s drive to keep her children safe in the midst of chaos. The book

Author Jessica Hendry Nelson

begins with Nelson’s childhood in the suburbs of philadelphia and chronicles her father’s addiction and death, her brother’s battle with drugs and mental illness, her own efforts to find and maintain stability, and her mother’s exquisite power, grief, and self-destruction in the face of such complicated family dynamics. each of the book’s chapters concerns a different relationship—friends, lovers, and strangers are all at play—but at its heart the book is about family, the ties that bind, enrich, and betray us, and how one young woman sought to rise above her perilous surroundings.

*On My Radar signifies a book that is not in my to-be-read stack, but looks very interesting.