A few pages into this book, I was completely hooked. Rickey Gates starts off with his motivation to run across the US (from the East to the West), then goes on to describing his route in more detail. From the beginning of his journey on, Gates starts including conversations with locals into the story.

The book is designed to show how people and their culture change as Gates moves further west. However, the snippets of conversation are too short and it’s hard to make out a common thread in these little stories. Gates plainly talks about his encounters with locals and leaves the reader alone to judge. Although I welcome the distance to the author’s own thoughts in these situations, I wish there were a few more pages to this book that show Gates’ own experiences and challenges he faced while running. The book is supposed to show the “ordinary and extraordinary people and place he saw along the way,” but the little stories he tells are too shallow to really let the reader in.