Events
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Start: 7:30 pm
“We do not take a trip; a trip takes us,” John Steinbeck noted
in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley.
In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled upon a used copy of Travels in Ireland, where he has lived
for the past eight years, and it inspired him to explore the mood of the United
States as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. With a hotly
contested election looming, and in the shadow of an economic meltdown, Barich
set off on a 5,943-mile cross-country drive from New York
to his old hometown in San Francisco
via Route 50, a road twisting through the American heartland.
Long Way Home is the
stunning result of his pilgrimage, an illuminating and perceptive portrait of America
at a dramatic point in its history. Where Steinbeck returned from the road
depressed about the country’s soul, Barich – while not uncritical of the
narrow-mindedness and incivility of our present culture – finds brightness
among the dark and rekindles his belief in the long view, as exemplified by the
unbridled optimism of some high school kids in Hutchinson, Kansas, and by the
undaunted spirit of an eighty-year-old barber he chanced upon in Jefferson
City, Missouri. “The world truly does renew itself while we’re looking the
other way,” he observes.
From the Easter Shore of Maryland to the spectacular
landscape of Moab, Utah, to Steinbeck’s own Salinas Valley,
filled with memorable encounters and redolent with history and local color, Long Way Home is a truthful, inspiring account of the country at a social
and political crossroad. “The highway nakes into a tunnel,” Barich writes about
a stretch of Route 50 in West
Virginia, “the erupts into the light with the force
of revelation.”
Bill Barich is the author of eight books, among them A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the
Fate of the Irish Pub and the racetrack classic Laughing in the Hills. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a
Literary Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library, and has written for The New Yorker for many years. He
currently lives in Dublin – and California.
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