| A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America Contributor(s): Horwitz, Tony (Author) |
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ISBN: 0312428324 ISBN-13: 9780312428327 Publisher: Picador USA OUR PRICE: $22.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2009 Annotation: On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz made an unsettling discovery: despite all his education, from grade school through college (as a history major, no less!) he had reached middle aged with a third-grader's understanding of early America. In fact, he's mislaid the entire period separating Columbus's landing in 1492 and the arrival of the English in Jamestown in 1620. Horwitz resolves to find out what happened in between. What he discovers is a wild, century-long land-grab, with America crisscrossed by conquistadors, castaways, slaves and other travelers, who roamed and rampaged across half the states in the present U.S. before the Mayflower hit ground. He uncovers that history during an epic quest of his own--a road trip to all the present-day sites of the explorers' adventures, cities and towns and backwaters where America's lost history lies just beneath the surface of daily life. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Expeditions & Discoveries - History | North American |
| Dewey: 970.01 |
| Physical Information: 1.4" H x 5.5" W x 8.2" (0.90 lbs) 445 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: A Voyage Long and Strange is a rich mixture of scholarship and modern-day adventure that brings the forgotten first chapter of America's history vividly to life. What happened in North America between Columbus's sail in 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620? On a visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he doesn't have a clue, nor do most Americans. So he sets off across the continent to rediscover the wild era when Europeans first roamed the New World in quest of gold, glory, converts, and eternal youth. Horwitz tells the story of these brave and often crazed explorers while retracing their steps on his own epic trek--an odyssey that takes him inside an Indian sweat lodge in subarctic Canada, down the Mississippi in a canoe, on a road trip fueled by buffalo meat, and into sixty pounds of armor as a conquistador reenactor in Florida. |
Contributor Bio(s): Horwitz, Tony: - Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include Midnight Rising, A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East, and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War. Horwitz has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. |