MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
On the road with Ron Jacobs
JOHN GREEN finds an ideal travelling companion as he works his way from New England to Florida
Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
[Ron Jacobs] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation
Ron Jacobs, Fomite, £11.99
I SUPPOSE living in a country as massive as the United States, with its diverse landscapes and people, it is easy to get itchy feet and a wish to set out to explore the essence of a country that is yours but which you know little about. There are also, of course, famous precedents like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley to mention just two.
Here Ron Jacobs follows their examples, chronicling his journeys from New England to Oregon, Texas to Minnesota and beyond, observing the US as it struggles to remember and redefine itself on its way towards an uncertain future.
During the 1970s and 1980s, as a footloose wage-slavery refusenik and recreational drug user, Jacobs hitchhiked around the USA, absorbing its ambience. In many ways that was a benign era compared with today. Beginning in 2021, he decided to retrace his own footsteps and take the pulse of the nation once again, but this time seeing it through the eyes of a wiser and older traveller.
More from this author
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
JOHN GREEN is stirred by an ambitious art project that explores solidarity and the shared memory of occupation
JOHN GREEN applauds an excellent and accessible demonstration that the capitalist economy is the biggest threat to our existence
JOHN GREEN isn’t helped by the utopian fantasy of a New York Times bestseller that ignores class struggle and blames the so-called ’progressives’
