Blue Highways: A Journey into America
Author: William Least Heat Moon
William Least Heat-Moon's journey into America began with little more than the need to put home behind him. At a turning point in his life, he packed up a van he called Ghost Dancing and escaped out of himself and into the country. The people and the places he discovered on his roundabout 13,000-mile trip down the back roads ("blue highways") and through small, forgotten towns are unexpected, sometimes mysterious, and full of the spark and wonder of ordinary life. Robert Penn Warren said, "He has a genius for finding people who have not even found themselves." The power of Heat-Moon's writing and his delight in the overlooked and the unexamined capture a sense of our national destiny, the true American experience.
Chicago Sun-Times
"Better than Kerouac." --Chicago Sun-Times
Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas
Author: Matthew OBrien
The catacombs of ancient Rome served as houses of worship for Christians. When surveyed in the early 1800s, the sewers of Paris yielded gold, jewels and relics of the revolution. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a slave trade thrived in underground chambers along Portland, Oregon's waterfront. And thousands of street people lived in the subway and train tunnels of New York City in the 1980s and '90s.
What secrets do the Las Vegas storm drains keep? What discoveries wait in the dark? What's beneath the neon?
Armed with a flashlight, a tape recorder and an expandable baton, Las Vegas CityLife writer-editor Matthew O'Brien explored the Las Vegas flood-control system for more than four years.
Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it's least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow.
Publishers Weekly
In 2002, as managing editor of the alternative weekly, Las Vegas CityLife, O'Brien was intrigued when a murderer eluded police by vanishing into the Vegas flood-control system. After O'Brien and CityLife contributor Josh Ellis explored half a dozen storm drains, their adventures attracted such attention on the Internet that the publication's Web site scored a million hits in a day. By then, O'Brien was convinced "there were secrets to be discovered beneath the neon." His first discovery was that, despite the dangers, homeless men and women were living in the tunnels. How did they wind up there? Returning with a tape recorder and flashlight, he interviewed the storm-drain denizens, finding one sleeping in an elevated bed suspended above the watery floor, another residing in a plywood hut and some in the cool tunnels just to escape the heat. The photos capture the inhabitants of these bleak encampments. Continually contrasting the sparkling casinos above with the dank, cobwebbed catacombs below, the observant O'Brien writes with a noirish flair, but his compassion is also evident as he illuminates the lives of these shadowy subterranean dwellers. (June 1)
Las Vegas-based journalist O'Brien offers an engaging if slapdash account of exploring the city's storm drains and meeting the people living in them. In 2002, O'Brien and fellow writer Josh Ellis went wandering through the drains and emerged with stories. O'Brien's book (with moody, too-sparsely-used photos by Danny Mollohan) uses that adventure as a starting point for his return during a 2004 sabbatical from his day job, editing the local alt-weekly. Armed with a tape recorder and a couple failing flashlights, O'Brien covers the underground, chatting up the dozens of folks he comes across. They're a mostly welcoming crowd-many Vietnam vets, most with gambling and drug problems, all with a story to tell. Less friendly are the crack-addled street kids who advise O'Brien to stay clear. There are wonders to be found in the gloom, including a woman who came all the way to Vegas just to bring gifts to her tunnel-dweller son and make sure he's okay, and a graffiti art gallery that surpasses anything in the glittering city above. There's also danger: During heavy rains, the area can fill with floodwater at the rate of a foot per minute. O'Brien brings an explorer's passion to his lively work, which suffers, nevertheless, from a certain thinness of research.