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Title: Interstate

Subtitle: Hitchhiking Through the State of a Nation

Author: Julian Sayarer

Narrator: Joe Jameson

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-26-17

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Travel & Adventure, Essays & Travelogues

Publisher's Summary:

Recruited to work on a documentary project, Julian goes to New York convinced he has hit big time at last. Finding the project cancelled, he wanders the city streets and, with nowhere else to go, decides to set out hitchhiking for San Francisco.

Revisiting this timeless American journey finds an unseen nation in rough shape. Along the road are homeless people and anarchists who have dropped out of society altogether, and blue-collar Americans who seem to have lost all meaning in forgotten towns and food deserts.

Helped along by roadside communities and encounters that somehow keep a sense of optimism alive, Interstate grapples with the fault lines in US society. It tells a tale of Steinbeck and Kerouac, set against the indifference of the vast US landscape and the frustrated energy of American culture and politics at the start of a new century.

Critic Reviews:

"On The Road for the Occupy generation." (Open Democracy)

Members Reviews:

Travelogue/memoir set across AMERICA

Frustrated at the last minute cancellation of a film project on the East Coast, young British filmmaker Julian Sayarer decided to fill the time he now has on his hands by hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco. An epic journey. But Julian has form in epic journeys â his first book Life Cycles chronicles his 2009 world-record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle. He rode 18,049 miles in 169 days. An impressive (and committed) young man â ready for another adventure.

And adventure (and commitment) he gets. Three weeks of hitching right across the United States. From New York, though New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California â with many a catastrophe along the way. The book is a brilliant read with the US Presidential Election now only weeks away. All is explained to those who cannot comprehend the Donald Trump phenomenon. Many of the people that Julian meets en route are ex-blue collar American workers whose jobs have been exported to China or Mexico, and whose wages â in their new jobs for those lucky enough to find one â have been depressed. A bus driver who used to be a highly paid steel worker. There is real disillusionment with Washington politics, and the changing face of America. These people do not feel listened to. Neither do they feel comfortable with someone asking for rides â the generosity of the past has moved on to be replaced by fear of a stranger. Julianâs best ride comes from an independent Indian truck driver who has no choice but to bend the law to meet the delivery deadlines set by his agent. The alternative (day after day) is not being able to make the next instalment on the loan he has taken out to buy the truck. These people feel the country has passed them by. A bit like the Brexit vote in the UK. The downtrodden underclass are ignored at its peril by the establishment. In the UK they did â and in the States they just might â bite back.

Julian also questions American values. A sign on the Interstate in Missouri âHit a worker â $10,000 dollar fine and lose your licenceâ â no concern for the fate of the workerâ Or the fact that grain fed to American cattle for the huge meat market could, of itself, pretty much abolish world hunger if distributed to the worldâs poor.