Storm: A Motorcycle Journey of Love, Endurance and Transformation (Travelers' Tales Footsteps)

By Allen Noren

Book Overview

Allen and Suzanne were seasoned travelers, and when Russia's Baltic states opened up for visitors in 1993, they eagerly embarked on a trip there. What they couldn't foresee were the record-breaking... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885211457
• ISBN13: 9781885211453
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Travelers' Tales
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Good travel book

This book was an insightful chronicle of one couple's motorcycle journey across parts of Europe. I enjoyed the dynamic interactions between the two main characters, as much as I enjoyed the travel dialogue. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys travel books.

Wonderful

A friend gave me this book as a gift and it sat on my desk for several months. Admittedly I was put off by the motorcycling aspect, but I'm sad now that that stopped me from opening it sooner. Last Sunday night I was going to file the book in my bookshelf but decided to read the first page before I did so. Needless to say I couldn't put it down. It's a wonderful tale of adventure, a dream and its reality, love, and, yes, ego. The story transcends the motorcycle and in that way is much more than a biker book. The motorcycling aspects are excellent, however, because the author is not one of those leather clad oafs with a humongous midlife crisis on his back. Rather, the descriptions are beautifully written and invite the reader to feel what it was like too. Well done.

I saved and savored this traveler's feast

I waited 4 months to start this book. The idea was to save it for a trip of my own and bring it with me on the road. I did. It was a bittersweet compliment to my travels and was so rich and wonderful that I almost forgot to soak in the landscape, folks, and energies of my CA to Seattle trek (granted, a small trip in comparison to Allen and Suzanne's Baltic Sea journey). Storm is one of those rare "pass-this-book-around" gems.

Great book!

I read a ton of travel books, and this one grabbed me early on and never let me go -- I read it in three days, but it took me a week to get back to my own life. Noren is a writer of wide range, able to describe complicated interpersonal relationships, disparate emotions, the thrill of racing a motorcycle over 100 miles an hour, the drudgery of weeks of rain -- and so much more. I'm glad he's given me the Balkans -- and so clearly that I now no longer feel the NEED to see that part of the world. The things that happen to Noren and his darling companion, and the places they see are so vividly described that I now count this trip as one of my own. It is, however, a trip I'm pretty glad I had nothing to do with. I suppose that in every traveler's deck there is the "bad trip" card, and this one did not strike me as a great time. But lousy trips sometimes make for the best reading -- and this is one of those times. At least twenty times I had to stop, lower the book for a moment, catch my breath, and say, "Now how in the world did he come up with THAT incredible string of words?"

Storm

Not since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Blue Highways has there been a book that so movingly captures the transformational effects of an "on the road" experience. Noren, a first-time author whose prose flows seamlessly, describes the dichotomy between the personal growth he's experiencing on this bike trip around the Baltic and the emotional distance it's creating with his long-time girlfriend. What I believed was going to be a travel narrative turned out to be a probing, self-revelatory, and sometimes disturbing examination of the nature of human relationships. What is remarkable about it is that he doesn't take sides. He peels open the relationship and explores it with great sensitivity and ultimately with great insight. I recommend it to you highly. It's a sleeper!