The Glimpse Traveler [Paperback]

When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey about memory and knowledge, beauty and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery. The narrator's path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel, now become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado. Neither a memoir about private misery, nor a shocking expos? of life in a turbulent era,The Glimpse Travelerdescribes with wry humor and deep feeling what it was like to witness a peculiar and impossibly rich time.

A cross-country road trip in the tradition ofZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Marianne Boruch, a poet, is Professor of English at Purdue University. She has published several poetry collections and two books of essays, and her work has appeared in theNew Yorker, theNation, and elsewhere.She has won two Pushcart Prizes, theParnassusTerrence DePres Award,and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

I have not seen another nonfiction book that offers such a perceptive, engaging, intimate chronicle of the early 1970s, the road-weary hippie hitchhikers, the anti-war sentiment, the dope-induced haze. Boruch . . . captures this very specific, significant time and place with exquisite clarity and lyric detail and description.

Marianne takes off into the unknown with $10, carrying her begging bowl and having the artist's faith that it will be filled with story. She never questions it. She's curious, and she follows that curiosity. The universe doesn't disappoint.

From its first pageThe Glimpse Travelerlaunches us on a trajectoryanOn The Road-style westward-ho picaresque journey through 1971 lã(