New book for Stange

Nipissing professor Ken Stange is set to release his new book, Going Home: Cycling though the heart of America, at Gulliver’s Bookstore in downtown North Bay on February 7.

The book is the record of a three-week cycling trip undertaken by a middle-aged man and his son, pedaling 2,500 kilometers from New Orleans back up the map to their home in Canada. For the father it was a brief return to the country that was his home for the first two decades of his life. For his son, it was an introduction to the country that had shaped his father. This book is about this land seen more intimately than is possible in a car. It is also about the people they met along the way: 'Saint' Cecil of Natalbany, Louisiana; Ma and the homebody farmer at Ma's Hitching Post in rural Tennessee; Dennis 'The Hustler' in Nashville; Rose and Albert at The Jam Factory in Louisville; the 'Third Brother' in Bowling Green; Jimmy of The Crow Bar in Sabina; Billy 'The Biker' on the Geneva Strip; and many others, all people that somehow within minutes (or hours) came to personify and capture, like apt images in a poem, the heart of America.