by Brad Herzog
From the show, Not Your Typical Vacation
5/31/00

From the Publisher
By age 27, Brad Herzog was a published author. He was well educated, newly married, upwardly mobile, the product of a good family. But when he took stock of himself, he saw someone trading a life for a living, a chronicler of the world whose universe was a view of a Chicago parking lot.

He was a cynic, and he wondered why. Did he and Generation X represent America as it approached the millennium, or did they merely misjudge it? Herzog believed the answer could be found far from the headlines and talk shows, in the nooks and crannies of the nation. So he and his wife, Amy, emptied their bank account, compacted their lives into a 34-foot Winnebago, and set a course for America.

States of Mind is the account of their 10-month philosophical, historical, and conversational journey across the country. What began as a literal search for the small places on the map turned into a figurative examination of the small places of the heart, a quest for virtues lost and negativity and disillusionment.

The answer is found in a four-hour sail with storyteller Bill Zuber in Friendship, Maine. It is in a bear hug and a two-hour diatribe from six-foot-eight, 340-pound "Chicken" Owen Foster in Pride, Alabama. It is also in a hailstorm, a grasshopper plague, and a debate with a priest and a pastor in Faith, South Dakota. States of Mind conjures the humor of Travels with Charley, the generational angst of On the Road, the introspection of Blue Highways. But having grown from that great tradition, it is finally a journey all its own.