The columns in this book all appeared in the Burlington Free Press between 1989 and 2003, with the exceptions of the following longer essays which appeared in the Boston Globe between 1993 and 2002: "Now that the cows are gone"; "Losing the library"; "Why the Green Mountains turn red"; "Of memory and hope"; "Untethered in Spain, set free on Route 66"; "Talking then, talking now"; and "The ladies' room just inside tomorrowland." In addition, "A person can learn a lot from Ian Freeman" is being published for the first time.

"In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers were about to storm a crack house. Bohjalian and his wife were told to hit the ground for their own protection.

While lying on the pavement, Bohjalian's wife suggested that perhaps it was time to move to New England." "Months later they traded in their co-op in Brooklyn for a century-old Victorian house in Lincoln, Vermont (population 975), and Bohjalian began chronicling life in that town in a wide variety of magazine essays and in his newspaper column, "Idyll Banter."".

"These pieces, written weekly for twelve years and collected here for the first time, serve as a diary of both this writer's life and how America has been transformed in the last decade."--BOOK JACKET.

Adult