The Next Better Place

the long version

"Albany, New York, 1959. Michael Keith is eleven years old and is being transferred to the care of his estranged, alcoholic father. "Don't drink! Bars are no place for a child. He needs to have a bath and his clothes and underwear need to be washed. School is important. If there is a problem, just bring him back, okay?" Despite his mother's stern warning, Michael and his dad ditch Albany and set off hitchhiking out West. Trading his schoolbooks for a Rand McNally atlas, Michael spends the rest of his childhood crisscrossing the country - rarely attending class, surviving on shoplifted sardines and sugared bread, sleeping in rundown rooming houses, rousing his soused dad from seedy bars. The twosome is perpetually en route to someplace else.". "Remarkably, today Michael Keith is a professor at Boston College. His memoir, told without sentimentality in the funny, world-wise voice of the young boy he once was, describes the peculiar characters encountered while hitchhiking our nation's windswept highways. In the homeless missions of Pittsburgh and Fort Worth, where they hole up as Michael's father works odd jobs to make enough money for them to move on; in the carnivals of Kansas and casinos of Las Vegas, where Michael dreams of Hollywood stardom; and in every two-bit town along the way, we glimpse an America far outside convention. Yet despite their dysfunctional existence, there is real love between this father and son, and they share the glorious freedom of the peripatetic life. That such happiness exists in a lonely marginal universe doesn't overshadow the fact that a Greyhound bus is the closest Michael comes to experiencing home." "The Next Better Place explores the fine line between wanderlust and compulsion, between running away and arriving, and leaves us with the understanding that the journey is often more powerful than the destination."--BOOK JACKET.