Life on the Road, A

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons BOOK: Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Edges Moderately Soiled; Slight Yellowing Due to Age. DUST JACKET: Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Slight Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. BOOK NUMBER: 9011. FRONT JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY: Lester Lefkowitz. JACKET DESIGN: Mike Stromberg. CONTENTS: Foreword 1. Wanderlust 2. Radio Days 3. The Greenhorn Kid 4. Globe-Trotting 5. The Runaway Cruise Ship 6. Lieutenant Son 7. Rio 8. Equator Crossings 9. Hollywood 10. Ninety Degrees North 11. Boxes on Wheels 12. On the Road 13. Izzy and Larry and Charlie and Me 14. Celebrity 15. Luck 16. Down by the Riverside 17. Mr. Black 18. Flight 19. Aluminum Tubes with Wings 20. Perils 21. Animal Tales 22. What They Say 23. Brushes with the Famous 24. The Dentist 25. Regrets. 26. A Place to Come Home to. SYNOPSIS: "I come from wandering tribes," writes Charles Kuralt. "I always wondered where the roads went." He has spent a lifetime satisfying that curiosity, and now, at last, in his ebullient, long-awaited memoir, Kuralt takes us with him down those roads, introducing us--with humor, warmth, affection and an eloquent insight into America and Americans--to many of the people, places and events encountered in a life spent roaming. In A Life on the Road, he chronicles his boyhood traveling around North Carolina with his social worker father, and wanting never to come home; his early days writing for newspapers and radio and television news, at a time when nobody even knew what television news was; his promotion at the ripe old age of twenty-three to CBS News Correspondent, and his adventures for ten years thereafter, circling the globe from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and the Congo to Bangkok and Bogota and all the way up to the North Pole. Finally, he writes, he asked his bosses at CBS if he could maybe come back for a while, wander the country and do feature stories. All right, they said, just keep the budget low, and for twenty-three years now, that's what he's been doing. It's all gloriously here, from a remarkable happening in the steamy Okefenokee Swamp, to a night he was stranded on an Alaskan glacier, to a miraculous Fourth of July spent on a Wyoming dirt road at the peak of wildflower season. He describes the oddities of traveling the backroads in a motor home, where people ask you to autograph their chain saws and you sometimes have to run the bus on vodka in lieu of antifreeze. And of course, he writes about the people who have enriched his life on the road--pilots and cowboys; soldiers and craftsmen; a ninety-two-year-old brickmaker named Mr. Black and his improbable adventures with the State Department; a Russian dentist named Nikita Aseyev, who waited forty-three years to convey a very special message to America; and many, many more. Throughout, Kuralt writes with the generosity, compassion and clear, literate style that have made him not only one of our best journalists but, in Time's words, "the laureate of the common man." Of his best-selling 1985 collection of "On the Road" pieces, On the Road with Charles Kuralt, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Few books today leave their readers uplifted, feeling better and happier for the experience. This is one." And this is another. It is pure delight--like its author, a national treasure. Charles Kuralt appears regularly on the CBS Evening News and anchors the CBS News broadcast Sunday Morning. He and his crew have logged more than a million miles "On the Road" alone, and in the process have won a host of honors, including nine Emmys and three Peabody Awards. Kuralt is the author of four previous books, To the Top of the World, Dateline: America, On the Road with Charles Kuralt and North Carolina Is My Home. He makes his home in New York City--when not "on the road.". First Edition 1st Printing. Hard Cover. As New/As New. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.