This is an amusing and sometimes touching book about the author’s travels to small, even tiny, towns throughout the United States. The people in these towns have festivals and museums to celebrate such mundane things as the watermelon, the tow truck, a frozen dead guy, a headless chicken and dried out cow dung, otherwise known as cow chips. I laughed out loud when I read about the United Baggage Center, where your unclaimed luggage goes when it gets off the plane and doesn’t get to you, and the Church of the Holy Barbeque, a Texas restaurant that serves brisket, ribs, and chicken that is “more than lunch; (it’s) a life experience.” Interspersed between several chapters are essays on the art of traveling through small-town America with tips on how to tell if you’re having a bad flight (tow truck arrives to jump-start your plane) or if you’ve checked into a less-than ideal motel (half-eaten burrito under bed).
The book is written in the straight-forward style of a reporter, the author after all is a CBS correspondent, with a lot of color provided by quotes from the local folks and the Geist’s own dead-pan sense of humor. It makes for a thoroughly entertaining read about “the vanishing rural world from whence we all came…” SR 2007