A Land So Fair and Bright: The True Story of a Young Man's Adventures Across Depression America

by Russ Hofvendahl

Book Overview

Hofvendahl's travels at 16 seem right out of Woody Guthrie. When he jumped ahip in 1938, he headed east through Canada, south to New Orleans via New York, and across to San Francisco. He rode the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0924486104
• ISBN13: 9780924486104
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Sheridan House
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

great adventure!

This book is first and foremost a great adventure and coming of age story, but it is also a glimpse into another era in American history. Much like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Hofvendahl's account takes us back to a time that few living people still remember, and one cannot help but compare and contrast it to the America of today. If you're ready for a little armchair adventuring, this is a great read!

A treasure to be read by all

With the folks who came of age during the Depression shrinking in ranks these days this story is so important. Ordinary people led extraordinary lives not because they were thrillseekers so much as they were doing what was necessary to survive and had accidental adventures along the way. This colorful story will captivate you and is a great history lesson as well. I read it during a blizzard and was thrilled that I was unable to go anywhere so I could keep enjoying the story.

Best in its genre!

Mr. Hofvendahl's reminiscences are the best I've read. Steinbeck traveled with Charley during the final years of the writer's life. Least Heat Moon took to the highways because of a mid-life crisis. Both works were less about the authors and more about observing the land and the people. Even Kerouac's time on the road was less a time of discovery than of social commentary. Not so with Hofvendahl. Here is a young man -- less than two decades into his life -- filled with a desire to experience new things in a pre-war era most of us never knew.Writing 50 years after the events took place, Hofvendahl's style is crisp. His ability (as an older adult) to convey the youthful enthusiasm of a teenager is wonderful. The work is an observation of people and places, but it is also an account of Hofvendahl's own coming of age.Taken from one of the era's songs of life on road, "A Land so Fair and Bright" is terrific. Think "Summer of 42" meets "Blue Highways" and you'll get the picture.

An excellant account of bare-boned travel in 1938 America.

Mr. Hofvendahl is a masterful writer who describes an extended summer of his distant youth with a foot-on-the-pavement jolt adorned with powder blue images of a summer sky. The book conveys the fear and cold of a lonely road as well as the warmth of good-hearted people that he met during his travel. It is a grand sequel to his first book, Hard on the Wind, which told of his earlier adventure on a four-masted schooner on the Bering Sea off Alaska's coast.