A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Featured Authors
Who Says “You Can’t Go Home Again”? Book Signing – Burlington, Vermont
Near the end of the posthumously published You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe muses, through the eyes of his literary alter ego, George Webber “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” According to a superb website simply called “How Books Got Their Titles,” Wolfe got the title for his novel while having dinner with a friend. He told her how people of his home town of Asheville were really quite put out by his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, going so far as to make threats on his life (even today those feelings have not died. Rumor has it that the fire a couple years ago in the Thomas Wolfe house was set by unforgiving descendants of slighted Ashevillians). His companion commented: “But don’t you know you can’t go home again?” [...] Read More »
Midwest Book Review
Lives up to its title. Illustrated with full-color photography throughout, A Journey Through Literary America is a book for book lovers – surveying great American authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. Annie Proulx, and many more. Each author has a brief biographical profile combined with breathtaking photography of the places they lived or that inspired them to create masterpieces. A wondrous tour ideal for enriching any literary collection – and sure to appeal to armchair travelers as well, A Journey Through Literary America lives up to its title and is highly recommended. Read More »
Rita Dove
What a very beautiful and evocative book! I am pleased — and honored — to be a part of it. Read More »
Shelf-Awareness
Gift Books for the Holidays, Part III This absolutely gorgeous book belongs in every book lover’s library. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, ending with E. Annie Proulx and Richard Ford, Thomas Hummel examines the relationship between place and an author’s identity, writing about 26 authors, with brief biographies and excerpts of their prose. Tamra Dempsey’s photographs are the perfect enhancement to Hummel’s essays. Willa Cather is evoked with golden prairies and a farmhouse in a sunset-red sky; Langston Hughes with brownstones and Bailey’s Funeral Home in Harlem; Raymond Carver with the site of his childhood home in Yakima (“living on a staple of bitterness”) and the Cornerhouse Restaurant and the marina in Port Angeles. Original: http://news.shelf-awareness.com/mv/a1/801347.html Read More »
The Buckeye Book Fair
Akron-Canton Airport: I knew I was not in California when I opened the driver’s side door of my rented Hyundai Accent and saw, laid across the passenger’s seat like a sword, a brand new ice scraper, with broom on one end. For use if needed. Thankfully, I never had to use it. On the way from the airport to my distant hotel, I listened to the radio’s pre-set station, a talk radio station. Clearly local. The talk radio hosts batted around notions of what would happen when their contract with Clear Channel Communications came up for renegotiation. The host was pretty sure they’d be asked to move to a bigger market than Akron/Canton to extend, so to speak, their listening empire. His female sidekick, who followed the role of modern talk radio female sidekicks and enable—which consists mostly of never saying no—wasn’t so sure about that. But she sounded willing to believe. The commercials came. And after that they played “name that bitch,” which consisted of playing a sound clip from some recent woman in the news, and then guessing who it was. This day’s clip was Anna Kournikova. Is this what passeth for talk radio in the smaller markets? [...] Read More »
Small Press Reviews
I’ll start this review by admitting that I’m not the easiest guy in the world to shop for, and I really do feel bad for all of the people in my life who have to buy me gifts whenever my birthday or Christmas rolls around. The problem, if you can call it that, is that I’m just not into things. I am, however, a book lover, but this also raises a number of issues in the gift-giving arena–the biggest of which is that nobody (including myself half the time) knows which books I own or have read, and so nobody knows which books to give me. And, yes, there are always gift cards to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but these gifts, heartfelt and sincere though they may be, smack slightly of defeat. They say, “I wanted to get you something, but I didn’t know what, so I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.” I say all of this because I’m sure I’m not the only person out there who’s hard to buy for. And I further suspect that all of these people who are, like me, hard to buy for have people who love them and who want [...] Read More »
Binghamton New York to Boston
Hudson to Binghamton was a long stretch of empty highway, often squeezed down to one lane in each direction (though TARP was not officially credited) with some of the tiredest looking traffic cones I have ever seen. The view from the highway was of trees, more of a mix of firs than I had seen, the occasional Quonset hut, of exits for towns like Panama and Cuba and Coopers Plains (which I thought might have been a model for Fenimore Cooper but might actually be named after an Australian town), some beautiful, stark countryside. As it grew dark, the signs telling how many miles to Binghamton ceased. It was with great relief that we finally entered the outskirts of the connected communities of Vestal (where my mother was born), Endicott, Johnson City, Binghamton, and Chenango Forks. Once mighty manufacturers of the Empire State, they are now remnants of their former selves. The people of these towns knew how to make things once. Great things. It is one of the heedless cruelties of capitalism that the factories that made the region prosperous have pulled out or gone under. It was with an unbelievable sense of relief that we got off at [...] Read More »
Indiana to Ohio
The next day we saw the most we had seen of Chicago—in our rear view mirror. By mid-morning we had passed Garry, Indiana—the birthplace of Michael Jackson and by midday we stopped in South Bend (home of Notre Dame) for a bathroom and exercise break. The dominance of football was obvious from our entry into the city. The lanes of the public highway were marked (permanently, it seemed) with the parking lanes for the football stadium (VIP, Season Tickets, etc.). We found a spot in a quiet park by the river (the one that bends south, I presume). It was a beautiful fall day, the wind gusting and sending leaves floating down from the trees. It was something I was sure Felix had never seen before. I tried to get him to appreciate them but he was more concerned with running around, and the big dog we passed. The park had an old cabin that had belonged to the first resident of South Bend. It was locked and deserted. So were the public bathrooms. We moved on. It was one of the longest days of the trip. We lost an hour as we passed into East Coast time. [...] Read More »
Red Cloud, NE to Omaha, NE
What came down had to go back up. We returned from Red Cloud to the Interstate via Hastings, passing a Pony Express Road on the way. We drove by Valentino’s on the city’s main drag, the pizza and pasta buffet highly touted by AAA that is not going to make the Journey Through Gustatory America tour book. There was a bookstore in Hastings that I had made an appointment to stop by but they were closed that Sunday—or so I came to believe, when I called their number twice and it rung 15 times without a response. When you make a cross-country tour you begin to get a feel for the long roads, a broader vision. Quite a few Americans live most of their lives along sections of highways that, as stretch hundreds or even thousands of miles in one direction or the other. When I was growing up we lived along Route 7, which ran to the Canadian border in one direction and to Norwalk, Connecticut in the other. I, who possessed none of the geographical acumen my two brothers inherited (somehow the Cartography Fairy skipped over me), assuredly had no idea of its length until I was much [...] Read More »
Denver to Hastings, NE to Red Cloud, NE
East of Denver, more of the same. Interstate lanes, buttes and rises and hillocks smoothed by mighty earthmoving equipment to create the Eisenhower Interstate System, alongside which not a living soul is to be seen…Our TARP dollars at work in mile after mile of road repairs: white line painting, paving, inexplicable spraying of liquid on the shoulders, miles upon miles of orange striped road work barrels taller than my son with signs warning of increased fines in road work areas (trying to give some of that TARP money back?) Back in Denver at the Tattered Cover the booksellers gathered ’round the book, admiring it. The Tattered Cover, another died and gone to bookstore heaven experience, a different heavenk, this one in a former opera house or theather…immense…with comfortable chairs, the barnes and noble experience of pleasanty seating but un-canned, the furrniture not something you would find at the Holiday Inn Express…W.P. Kinsella, Annie Leibovitz looking dramatic, Al Gore looking not, Nick Bantock, Opalonga Pugh, Bobbie Ann Mason looking like a Bobbie Ann (with all due respect), Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro looking like his prose, George Plimpton looking like a living icon (may he rest in peace), Susan Minot with flashes [...] Read More »
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