The Great Northern Express
A Writer's Journey Home
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From bestselling, nationally celebrated author Howard Frank Mosher, a wildly funny and deeply personal account of his three-month, 20,000-mile sojourn to discover what he loved enough to live for.
Several months before novelist Howard Frank Mosher turned sixty-five, he learned that he had prostate cancer. Following forty-six intensive radiation treatments, Mosher set out alone in his twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity on a monumental road trip and book tour across twenty-first-century America. From a chance meeting with an angry moose in northern New England to late-night walks on the wildest sides of America's largest cities, The Great Northern Express chronicles Mosher's escapades with an astonishing array of erudite bibliophiles, homeless hitchhikers, country crooners and strippers, and aspiring writers of all circumstances.
Full of high and low comedy and rollicking adventures, this is part travel memoir, part autobiography, and pure, anarchic fun. From coast to coast and border to border, this unforgettable adventure of a top-notch American writer demonstrates that, sometimes, in order to know who we truly are, we must turn the wheel towards home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Just before he turned 65, acclaimed novelist Mosher (Walking to Gatlinburg) learned that he had prostate cancer. During the course of his radiation therapy, he decides to embark on a cross-country road trip that he and his long-deceased uncle had once dreamed of taking. A week after his final radiation treatment, which coincides with the publication of his new novel, Mosher sets out on the Great American Book Tour in his 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity (the Loser Cruiser), which has 280,000 miles on the odometer, stopping at America's great independent bookstores in cities both large and small. Mosher colorfully weaves stories about his teaching in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with his misadventures in the Loser Cruiser, cheap hotels, and at readings and book signings to create a brilliantly vibrant quilt that covers us with his warmth, humor, and love of discovery, reading, and writing. In 65 short installments, Mosher regales us with rollicking tales of his encounter with an angry mother moose in a motel parking lot, the high school principal (the Prof) he worked for who measured his days in quarts of beer (a two-quart day was a bad one), and his conversion to cross-country skiing. Mosher admits that there's no place he'd rather hang out than a bookstore or a library, and he affectionately introduces us to some of America's greatest bookstores, including Square Books in Oxford, Miss.; the Tattered Cover in Denver; and Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., among others. With vivacious humor, Mosher carries readers along on this adventure that offers him a chance to gain a fresh perspective on what he loves enough to live for.
