From Sea To Shining Sea: A Present Day Journey Into America's Past

Synopsis

Gavin Young' s North American odyssey took him from Central Park and the old Atlantic whaling ports all the way to a tiny cabin in the Yukon, where Jack London heard 'the call of the wild'. Whether sleuthing through riot-racked Los Angeles in the footsteps of Philip Marlowe, crossing the Arizona Desert on Route 66 like Steinbeck's Depression-era migrant workers or searching for the characters of Cannery Row in Monterey, Young brilliantly uses the past to illuminate the present. 'Gavin Young is perpetually inquisitive, racially colour-blind, intrepid, reflective and gregarious ...plainly a man in a million, and a writer in two' - Bernard Levin. 'He catches the mind's eye of the reader very deftly ...and, without losing his sense of irony, gives us a genuine account of the tragedy and the pathos, as well as the optimism and bravery, that created American civilization' - Christoper Hitchens, Mail on Sunday .