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Sign up todaySame Ground
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“Read him.” — George Elliott Clarke, author of I & I and George and Rue
An award-winning author goes looking for the meaning of family and belonging on a glorious wild-goose-chase road trip across middle America
Wangersky’s great-great-grandfather crossed the continent in search of gold in 1849. William Castle Dodge was his name, and he was 22 years old. He wrote a diary of that eventful journey that comes into the author’s hands 160 years later. And typically, quixotically, Wangersky decides to follow Dodge’s westward trail across the great bulging middle of America, not in search of gold but something even less likely: that elusive thing called family.
What ensues becomes this story, by turns hilarious and profound, about a very long trip — by car, in Wangersky’s case, and on mule and foot in Dodge’s. Interweaving his experiences on the road with Dodge’s diary, the author contemplates the human need to hunt for roots and meaning as he — and Dodge — encounter immigrants who risk everything to be somewhere else, while only glimpsing those who are there already and who want to hold onto their claim in the stream of human migration.
Same Ground is a story about what time washes away and what persists — and what we might find, unexpectedly, if we go looking.
Reviews
“Russell Wangersky is a natural-born storyteller, and he weaves together two starkly different, yet oddly complementary journeys — past and present, home and away — and does so with great aplomb. Less a travel book than a palimpsest, Same Ground overlays the Gold Rush Trail of ’49 with its modern equivalent, featuring cowboys and cardsharps, dodgy motels and tatty roadside attractions, the ‘natural beauty’ of a slag pour and towns that died of thirst. A thoughtful, meditative look at the open road and where it can lead us.” — Will Ferguson, Giller Prize-winning author of 419 and The Finder
“Russell Wangersky weaves the diary of his ancestor’s trek in 1849 with his own pursuit along the California Gold Rush Trail in a seamless tapestry that melds space and time. His theme is connection: his own lost family, the families he and his wife Leslie meet on the blue highways of America, the moms and pops who run the motels and the diners. Same Ground takes us on a wild chase into the uncharted territories of the heart.” — Wayne Grady, author of The Good Father
“Overlaid like a stereoscope, past and present give Wangersky’s pilgrimage along the Gold Rush trail vivid three-dimensional reality. His great-great-grandfather’s diary is packed with fascinating detail, and the quest to see what he saw opens the old and the new west to our eyes. As the modern couple scuffle around in the desert, the road also reveals the anatomy of a marriage — as all the best journeys do. A thoroughly enjoyable book.” — Marina Endicott, author of The Difference
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