O America

Discovery in a New Land

William Least Heat-Moon

344 pages

Published: January 2020

ISBN: 9780826222046

Format:

Hardcover

Price: $29.95

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About This Book: As word of the discovery of gold in northern California spreads, an English physician, Nathaniel Trennant, accepts an offer to serve as doctor on a ship carrying immigrants to America. Alongside some two hundred emigres from northern Europe is a contingent of wealthy British people who call themselves not immigrants, but colonists. With this imported cultural divide, Nathaniel begins a long journey into what he terms the American experiment, one already under the stress of social injustices and economic inequities.

Trennant arrives in Baltimore and stumbles onto its slave market, where he witnesses the horrors of human bondage. One night in a boardinghouse he discovers under his bed a runaway slave. Disturbed and angered by the selling of human lives, he offers to help the young man escape, a criminal action that will put the slave and physician into flight from both the law and opportunistic slave hunters.

Traveling by foot, horse, stage, canal boat, and steamer, the two men gradually form a bond as they explore the backcountry and forge a deep friendship as they encounter the land and a host of memorable characters who reveal the nature of the American experiment.
Authors and Editors: William Least Heat-Moon, pen name of William Trogdon, is of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry. He lives in Missouri on an old tobacco farm he's returning to forest.

His first book, Blue Highways, tells of a 13,000-mile journey around America on back roads. His second work, PrairyErth, is a narrative exploration into a corner of the great tallgrass prairie in eastern Kansas. River-Horse gives an account of his four-month sea-to-sea voyage across the United States on rivers, lakes, and canals. In Roads to Quoz, Heat-Moon sets out for a half-dozen peculiar American destinations that have long intrigued him. Here, There, Elsewhere brings together a collection of his short-form reportage about places around the world. These six major books have never been out of print. His first work of fiction, Celestial Mechanics appeared in 2017.
Praise For This Book: "Throughout the book, author William Least Heat-Moon's narrator notes the dissonance between what America was purported to be and what America was at the time. When a founding document declares certain truths to be self-evident, and the first truth enumerated is all men are created equal, then one expects no distance between declarations and deeds. However, I regret to say it, given the respect I hold for many American institutions, such an egalitarian assertion is not the case today. Such observations are eerily applicable in the present day. Perhaps even more engaging than the social commentary on colonialism and racism, is the skill with which the author develops a narrative that makes the reader forget that this journal was not written in 1848 but 2019—truly an entertaining and educational read."—Michael A. Middleton, Deputy Chancellor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri School of Law. Dr. Middleton has also served as Interim President of the University of Missouri, and Interim President of Lincoln University.