Summary
Summary
At twenty-three, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn't know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it's the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
At 23, with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, Forsthoefel was uncertain about his future. To find some answers, he decided to walk from his suburban home in Pennsylvania to the California coastline. Taking minimal possessions (including a tent and some Snickers bars) and wearing a sign reading "Walking To Listen," Forsthoefel sought to clarify his own sense of self through the act of walking. By listening to others, he hoped to discover what it means to come of age. Featured throughout this lyrical adventure memoir are transcripts of conversations between the author and those he met on the road. Passages from his favorite writers (Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Kahlil Gibran) enhance the text. Each state Forsthoefel traversed receives some time in the descriptive spotlight. He considers weighty issues, such as race, privilege, religion, and family, and offers a fresh spin on familiar themes as he ponders how to approach the world and all its beauty and pain and how to listen to others. VERDICT This title will appeal to thoughtful teens and may serve as a tie-in to history, literature, and philosophy discussions.-Tara Kehoe, formerly at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center, Trenton © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 2011, at 23, after his Watson fellowship proposal to study the ways indigenous communities "guided their young people into adulthood" was rejected, and after he lost his job on a fishing boat, Forsthoefel packed his bags, brought books by Whitman and Rilke, and walked down the train tracks near his mother's Philadelphia home. Then, he kept walking, all the way to the Pacific. In this moving and deeply introspective memoir, Forsthoefel writes about the uncertainties, melodramas, ambiguities, and loneliness of youth while describing his trip, reaching out to strangers as he walks south toward Selma, and then west across Navajo lands, Death Valley, and the Sierras. Along the way, he meets widowers, waitresses, ranchers, veterans, reverends, mystics, glass blowers, delusional walkers, firefighters, Navajo drummers, artists, new fathers, and families who take him into their homes, sharing their rich and varied perspectives-and advice on living. Each conversation offers a glimpse into the vast range of American life. Forsthoefel's walk becomes a meditation on vulnerability, trust, and the tragedy of suburban and rural alienation. His radical openness to the variety of American experience includes unflinching encounters with lingering racism in Alabama, for instance. Forsthoefel's conversation with America is fascinating, terrifying, mundane, and at times heartbreaking, but ultimately transformative and wise. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
There are many different types of walking. Bliss-walking. Fury-walking. Swamp-walking. In his trek across America, Forsthoefel experienced these and many more, as he shares in this soulful book. A 23-year-old college graduate still smarting from the pain of his parents' divorce, Forsthoefel set out to grapple with his questions about coming-of-age by listening his way across the country. And listen he does, to an impressive variety of people, such as an alligator farmer looking toward the apocalypse, a nudist grandmother, and a sharecropper descended from a slave. Some open their homes and lives to him, sharing profound lessons in the unlikeliest places. Forsthoefel is disarmingly, almost painfully earnest, prone to quoting Whitman and Rilke and indulging in extended ruminations on the nature of life. But his openness provides a window into the extraordinary lessons to be learned from ordinary people. This is a memorable and heartfelt exploration of what it takes to hike 4,000 miles across the country and how one young man learned to walk without fear into his future.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Unsure of what to do after graduating from college, Forsthoefel decided to walk across America, from Pennsylvania to the Pacific coast, and listen to the fascinating stories of ordinary people. Forsthoefel includes chunks of many of these tales verbatim. But what is even more fascinating, and unexpected, is the journey he goes through himself. Guided by Walt -Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet-both of which he quotes from copiously-he discovers what he can endure, what he is capable of, and finds his place in the world. For the author, what started out as an attempt to understand our connections to other people ends in a greater understanding of a connection with himself. VERDICT A remarkable book that calls to mind William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways. (Memoir, 1/13/17; ow.ly/D1mr308cbNW)-DS © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.