The Last Hobo


Book Description

A 19-year old college student acts out his fantasy of being a hobo by hitchhiking across America in the year 1979.




The Last Great American Hobo


Book Description

Examines the life of Blackie, a hobo for sixty years, as he chooses to defend his life on the banks of the Sacramento and fight America's changing attitude toward the homeless.




Hobo


Book Description

On a cold, gray day in 1991, a kid named Eddy Joe Cotton left home with nothing but a warm jacket, some well-worn boots, and a few crumpled dollar bills. His father had just fired him, not for the first time, but for the last. He didn’t see his father again for two years. But this is not the story of a runaway—it is a tale of an unorthodox road to adulthood. By taking to the trains, Eddy Joe Cotton learned the difficulty of life lived on the margins, the fading importance of a once-celebrated American folk hero, and the ultimate meaning of freedom.




Hobo Mom


Book Description

A cross-Atlantic collaboration, Hobo Mom was drawn simultaneously. Both cartoonists’ clean line styles fit together perfectly to tell the story of Tom, who lives a simple life with his pre-teen daughter, Sissy. Her mother, Natasha, who left to hop trains and has become a vagrant, shows up on the doorstep of the family she abandoned years ago. There, Natasha finds an upset husband (who is still deeply in love with her), and a little girl yearning for a mother. Can someone who covets independence settle down?




Done and Been


Book Description

Includes a short history of hobos, oral histories of American hobos, recipes, and a glossary.




Citizen Hobo


Book Description

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.




The Last American Man


Book Description

Finalist for the National Book Award From the New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, Big Magic and City of Girls comes a riveting exploration of manhood and all its complicated meanings through the portrait of an American Mountain Man. In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.




The Areas of My Expertise


Book Description

In the great tradition of the American almanac, The Areas of My Expertise is a brilliant and hilarious compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom on all topics large and small. Although bestsellers such as Poor Richard’s Almanack and The Book of Lists were certainly valuable, they also were largely true. Here is a different kind of handy desk reference, one in which all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts are sifted through the singular, illuminating imagination of John Hodgman—which is the nice way of saying: He made it all up. John Hodgman brings his considerable expertise to bear in answering all of the questions book buyers have been asking: -What are the mottoes of the 51 United States? THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED -Who were the U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands? THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED -What role does the Yale secret society “Skull and Bones” play in the secret world government? THERE IS NO SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT -What was the menu at the first Thanksgiving, and did it include eels? Technically, that is two questions, but do not apologize, for John Hodgman shall answer them both . . . LATER. -Aside from a compendium of fake trivia, what is the best kind of book to write? A SIMPLE TABLE OF THE 55 MOST DRAMATIC LITERARY SITUATIONS PROVIDES THE ANSWER, and John Hodgman is the author of that table. Imagine if The Book of Lists had been rewritten by Peter Cook and Jorge Luis Borges under the pseudonym of “John Hodgman” and then renamed The Areas of My Expertise, and you will only begin to have a sense of the dizzying, uproarious, sublimely weird, and strangely wise journey that is contained within this book (along with all the pages and words). Perfect for anyone who thirsts for knowledge, and especially for collectors of books of fake trivia, The Areas of My Expertise offers through absurdity a better understanding of the world we share—and recognizes that while the truth may be stranger than fiction, it is never as strange as lies . . . or as true. Look out for John Hodgman's latest book, Vacationland, available from Viking in Fall 2017.




You Can't Win


Book Description

An amazing autobiography of a criminal from a forgotten time in american history. Jack Black was a burgler, safe-cracker, highwayman and petty thief.




The Last Professional


Book Description

Returning to the rails fifteen years after the childhood trauma that haunts him, young Lynden Hoover gets help from The Duke, an old hobo who calls America's landscape his home, adheres to an honor code, but is fleeing Short Arm, his merciless enemy. The Duke mentors Lynden, enlisting old Knights of the Road to keep himself and his apprentice safe. When Short Arm murders two of them, the stakes suddenly escalate to life or death.