Louis J. Salome

By planes, trains, and automobiles, journalist Lou Salome has hitched his way through some of the most interesting - and volatile - places on Earth.In September 1958, Lou Salome hurried past Barney McNeil's blacksmith shop to the town's blinking traffic light and began hitchhiking to college.He was seventeen. Decades later his hitching experience led Salome through deserts and hostile zones in Asia, Europe and Africa. At the end of his internationalist life, he thumbed in the New Hampshire woods to gauge how times had changed. This is his story of the adventures, risks and the fun he embraced while engaging in a lost art.

This memoir by an American journalist explores how entrenched notions of self, family, and tribalism dictate human behavior in our modern world. Salome's work as a foreign correspondent, reporting from such places as Belfast, Kabul, Bosnia and Somalia, provided him with a unique perspective on the role nationalism and tribalism play in conflicts around the globe. While sweeping in its scope, the work bears witness to one man's examination of his familial roots and ethnicity, and the ways in which tribalism is found lurking under his own roof. Includes 26 photographs, as well as maps to familiarize readers with some of the world's most misunderstood and volatile regions.