States of Mind

by Brad Herzog

Can you find love in Love, Virginia? Is there inspiration in Inspiration, Arizona? Brad Herzog took stock of his Generation X lifestyle and didn't like what he discovered. So he and his wife emptied their bank accounts, packed everything into a Winnebago, and set a course for a fabled America they weren't sure existed. What began as a literal search for the small places on the map became a figurative examination of the small places of the heart, a quest for virtues lost amid negativity and disillusionment. From Justice, West Virginia, where one-half the population descends from the Hatfields and McCoys, to Harmony, California, a town that's up for sale and can be yours for the right price, States Of Mind eloquently and intelligently brings into focus an American psyche often blurred by intersecting cultures -- and is, ultimately, an unforgettable journey all its own.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

402 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

Brad Herzog is the author of more than 50 books for readers of all ages. His children's books include two charmingly illustrated picture books about two of the most inspiring moments in championship sports history -- the 2016 Chicago Cubs World Series triumph (MURPHY'S TICKET, Sleeping Bear Press, 2017) and the 1913 U.S. Open golf tournament (FRANCIS AND EDDIE, Why Not Books, 2013). He has written more than a dozen rhyming alphabet picture books for Sleeping Bear Press, including H IS FOR HOME RUN, S IS FOR SAVE THE PLANET (a finalist in the National "Best Books 2009" Awards) and W IS FOR WELCOME: A CELEBRATION OF AMERICA'S DIVERSITY, which is sold at the Statue of Liberty Pavilion.

Brad is also the author of four critically acclaimed narratives about his travels through small-town America. His first travel memoir, STATES OF MIND (John F. Blair Publishing, 1999), reached #2 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. He followed that with SMALL WORLD (Pocket Books, 2004) and TURN LEFT AT THE TROJAN HORSE (Citadel Press, 2010). DETOUR 2020 (Why Not Books, 2020) is his cross-country chronicle of "America's wrong turns."

As a freelance magazine writer, Brad has been honored several times by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), including a Grand Gold Medal for best feature article of the year. He has been interviewed on "The Today Show" and "Oprah" and has been profiled in publications ranging from People magazine to Reader's Digest. Brad (www.bradherzog.com) lives on California's Central Coast.

Reviews

[Aaron Ritchey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny about this book, it's the kind of book that you would think about writing, but never actually write. I can see the conversation...hey, I'll write a book about places in America with inspiration or odd names, all the while travelling across the U.S. Herzog took the "what if" and made it into a reality. And what a wonderful thing his book turned out to be. It's clever, interesting, well-written, and insightful. I did want more of a closure at the end, a kind of flourish in the finish, but maybe that's not what America and road trips are about. Maybe it's about the journey, and since our journey never really ends, just like there is no pot of gold on the other side of the American rainbow, it's good a travelogue just motors on home -- a car disappearing over the hill on I-80.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wisdom, Faith, Freedom, Harmony, Love, Justice, Glory, Friendship: a list of some of the towns the author and his wife visited on a quest to find America. It was a quest to dispel cynicism and find some beauty on the people of America, and he did in great little vignettes of these towns. He didn’t always find the embodiment of the word in the town: there is no justice or triumph in Justice, WV, or Triumph, LA. But he found Americans who in their plainness, simplicity, lives, and loves inspire us all to live our lives now, not tomorrow, not next week, not when we retire. There is a huge gap between this book and what I have always sought on cross country trips; I am entirely about the landscape and the power of the land. I am fortunate enough to daily work with people intimately so I feel like my experiences of people are accomplished in a different way. And I am the furthest from a cynic as imagined, but I understand why people are, and just love when people leave their comfort zone to look at life from a different framework and viewpoint. And I was doubtful he would find the towns represent their names explicitly in a few days, but I imagine if he lived in them a while, there might be more evidence. Overall, a great read, fast, funny, real.

“Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning.” John Steinbeck

Harmony, CA: “What is harmony? Something more than accord, perhaps a melodious understanding. Is it the same as peace? Absolutely not. Peace can be passive. It seems to imply something thrust upon us rather than achieved, with tension and force as prerequisites. In a continuum with harmony on one end and disharmony on the other, peace is in the middle. Harmony is actively bettering the world; peace is just not making it worse. Harmony is the opposite of war; peace is merely the absence of it. Certainly, harmony is easiest to find in manageable quantities of humanity. Harmony among the masses is unimaginable. Harmony against eighteen is not.” The lesson learned here is one of carpe diem: the town owners were trying to sell the town because the husband was diagnosed with cancer and they wanted to travel. It validated the author’s quest but the town was hard to sell and the husband died within 4 months.

Inspiration, AZ: “The desert, perhaps more than any other landscape, topples expectations. It is not a place of colorless monotony. Color is visible when light falls upon it, and this is a sun-punished setting…” I can appreciate the novelty of a non-naturalist’s description of landscape sometimes, and I like the imagery of toppling expectation. Funnies: In Yuma, the newscasts broadcasted, “60 humans attending a fiddling contest today,” and “Dozens of humans were on hand to watch a football game,” and “Humans are in for nice weather this week.” They were actually saying “Yumans.” Inspiration is a town built up around a mine, and it was cookie cutter monotony, a type of boom town with no soul. The author was inspired to continue on his quest to seek inspiration, to seek out experiences to balance out his healthy privilege.

Hope, MS: This was one of the most powerful and hard to read stories. They never discovered why the town was called Hope, and they felt the nerves of being in the Deep South. I remember feeling the same way when I headed to Panama City, FL for a travel assignment and passed through and got to know many “expats” from Alabama and Mississippi. I was shocked to discover there was a town in Mississippi that had just integrated their prom. In 2009. “Morgan Freeman was disappointed to learn that his local high school in Charleston, Miss., still held separate proms, one for black students, one for white. So he offered to pay for a single prom that both could attend. That was 1997. It took 11 years for the school to take Freeman up on his offer.” The author is travelling in 1996 so they are encountering the area still at the point of deep segregation and hatred. It is still ingrained in the memories and actions of the people there.

The story of the 3 Freedom Riders who were killed in the Civil Right fight is highlighted next to an interview of 3 carefree young white girls and a lighted from within African American woman who was a sharecropper’s daughter and experienced the lawless near slavery of that time. It is so hard to understand the deepest hatred of racism: I understand it comes from a deep genetic fear of the other, so mistrust of the other, dislike, avoidance, it is despicable but it can be combated through exposure and education. The irrational hatred and violence and homicidal tendencies chills me to the bone, and I can never comprehend it.

The African American woman has never voted, had never heard much about the murders of the freedom riders, which brought her town to national attention, but it turns out her landlord was one of the 19 men arrested and acquitted for their murders. The bodies were buried on his property. It is mind shattering to know these things, and while there is hope that we have our first African American president, I can only hope that this woman was able to vote for the first time in that election. That would be the story of hope from Hope, MS.

Love, VA: The author portrays a couple, both in their second marriage, who demonstrate a solid, loving marriage where they find near perfect companionship and desire for simplicity. The wife writes a newsletter of the people of the area where she celebrated the simple milestones and happenings. It is positivity in the press to the absolute. It is, in a way, exactly what the author hoped to do with his book, highlight the best of humans, Yumans, and Americans. I only disagree with his narrow definition of love as between husband and wife; he wrote about it in different forms throughout the book and I think it is many of our generation’s blind spot; the absolute spilling over in abundance of love in relationships we have with our community, our coworkers, our clients/patients, our families, our friends, our pets, our homes, our land. Open your heart as well as your mind!

Joy, IL: “Thirty years earlier, as he wandered Utah’s Canyonlands preparing to compile his thoughts in Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wondering if joy had any evolutionary value. “I suspect that it does,” he wrote. “I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.””

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in 2000 I owned a Chevy Blazer, a crazy boxer pup and dated a woman who ran off to South Dakota. I turned to this book that Christmas with dreams of driving cross country with many passages highlighted. Its been a long time since the read, the Blazer is long broken down, the dog rests by my feet and I married the girl. But, I still dream of hopping into a Winnebago and I'm content knowing that there are 85 people in Love (Virginia).

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting journey through small-town America to discover what makes people sustain and persevere. Got a little dry at times, as the journey was also one of self-awareness and philosophical delving. Sounded like a fun thing to do for a year, though.

[Julia DelSignore Peoples · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some parts of this book were tedious for me. I found myself saying, "I really don't care." But, there were some parts that I found very interesting.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is still being broadcast. You might not know it, but it really is. Long past its prime time, well, prime, and a half dozen hosts later, Millionaire has now joined the anonymous ranks of daytime game shows that had reduced the concept to so much cultural trivia, Millionaire originally serving as a reversal of that trend, a revival of a classic television tradition.

Brad Herzog sort of debuted in Millionaire's heyday. He was one of the early contestants, when being a contestant on Millionaire meant something (fans will always remember, for instance, the first winner, John Carpenter, who used his only lifeline to brag that he was about to become rich). States of Mind had just been released, and Brad used his appearance to plug it, and that put the book on the map (so to speak). All these years later, having found a used copy, that's in fact the reason I read it.

The Brad who appeared on Millionaire should probably have become acquainted with someone with that kind of vantage point. He recounts meeting a lot of people during a trek across the country, but he seems to have gathered no real perspective from it. Funny, because he has a gimmick about picking small towns with virtues for names, and he attempts to find wisdom and "the real America" from this approach.

Yeah, not so much. He's apparently, when he wrote this, incredibly well-read, and a regular historian, but he infuses so little of himself (and his wife, who mostly pops up asking supplementary questions now and then) into the proceedings, except to remark when he feels like it where exactly he's traveling through...

Really, it's a tale about a state of mind, Brad's, which is just as relevant in 2017 as it was in 1999, when the book was originally published. The disconnect between urban and rural lives has if anything expanded in the years since. Brad is no more equipped to understand why at the end of the journey than he is to explain why he went on it in the first place, a sort of smug gesture of privilege he shrugs off while condescending his stops all too frequently.

But again, this is itself an unintended conclusion from his exercise, the observer effect. By writing a book about it, he has quite literally woven himself into the narrative, one that hindsight has made all the more clear.

I wonder how much of his experiences are actually what he wanted to see rather than what he discovered. As a wanderer myself over the years, I've seen a lot of the country as a resident, having for instance transplanted to Maine early in life and heard what relatives feared, in the 1980s (no indoor plumbing!). But Maine is quite civilized, thank you, and there's more to it than lobsters and trees, although you wouldn't know it by reading this book, the thought process of which is to simplify into stereotype whenever possible...

But again, it's from a clear perspective, perhaps a prototypical one of the new millennium, the flattening of the age, where increased awareness has brought greater isolation than we could have possibly imagined. So in that sense, it's valuable, as a signpost. Or a warning. One we clearly didn't heed.

But hey! Who wants a million bucks, right?

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This couple bought an RV and traveled the U. S. seeking small towns with names like Honor, Freedom, Wisdom, Inspiration, Joy and others. They captured the essence of these places while exploring the history and conversing with the locals. A fun and educational ride around the country on the back roads.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to read an uplifting book about the United States. I was very disappointed. I got the impression that if the author could he would cut some of our states loose and set them adrift in the ocean. He seemed intent on telling the darkest history possible. I realize we have some dark history and I would change it if I could but I love the United States and I am fiercely patriotic. I have always dreamed about visiting all fifty states and I am getting closer to my goal. However I will form my own opinions and try to forget the state of mind this book left me in. I gave it 3 stars because it is well written and there are some interesting things in it but overall I was disappointed. Had I known it was a dark history book before I started it I probably would have rated it higher but honestly I thought it would be an uplifting, patriotic book.

[Gabbie Tilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and reading it is what made me begin to really enjoy travel literature. After reading this book, I felt more connected to all of the states and proud to be a Southerner. This book will definitely inspire a cross-country road trip if you weren't already inspired to go on one!

[Chelsea Triano · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a book I was assigned to read 5 years ago in high school, getting around to it now in the peak of my active adventuring in life was fun to get inspiration about where to visit and what to look for in life. Like some sections of the writing, traveling is always about the build up or the excitement, but about the lessons.

[Joy Kidney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young couple travels to small towns with virtuous names--like Faith, Hope, Unity, Wisdom, Joy, and Truth or Consequences. They find storytellers who've made their lives from all sorts of backgrounds and accents. The writing is delicious, as well, as they author includes area history and his own musings. He wrote, "We found substance and staying power in America's nooks and crannies."

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect book to read before a road trip (& to justify my itchy-footed wanderings!).

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this read so much that I am going to immediately continue the journey with Small World: A Microcosmic Journey.

I read When You Are Engulfed in Flames this week too. The juxtaposition of the two books has had my head spinning for the past few days.

Two authors, two ways of encountering the world and the people in it. Brad Herzog's reader enjoys predictable wave after wave of polite encounters that start with well mannered introductions and result in a story shared or a lesson learned. David Sedaris' reader laughs and grimaces their way through his encounters with people and places. The difference between the two? Respect, Research, Remove.

Herzog's research affords the reader a historic and geographic touchstone absent in Sedaris' encounters which are more idiosyncratic, more personally his own. I felt while reading Brad Herzog that his experiences and conversations could have been my own because of the structure of his research, writing and the rhythm of his distinct interviewer/interviewee style of encounter.

David Sedaris' story similarly relates his encounters with older generations. But they are individual, personal. He rubs ointment into their shoulders, sits alongside them in a solidarity of sorts til he sees their kitcsh turn to junk before his eyes, quarrels with them. Of his companion Hugh's mother he writes that the two of them had guinea worms years ago in the Congo. He does not deny the reader an image of the worms coming out of their living flesh, but goes on to remark that "I used to see the same thing, but after fifteen years or so, I got over it, and now I just see Maw Hamrick."

After 10 months on the road in an RV with Brad Herzog and his wife, Amy, the reader sees Amy only in her roles as wife and near silent travelling companion. She took the photos. He drove. We don't know who cooked, who cleaned, who navigated, who shopped what they found to disagree about? In fifteen years my hope is that the wide line of respect that separates Herzog's reader from the people he encounters will begin to narrow enough that his Maw Hamricks will come to life before the reader too. Brad Herzog voice and experience, like, yet-so-unlike Sedaris', is one I am looking forward to reading for years to come.

[Camille Maio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first saw this author on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", and was hooked when he described his first book.

I love travel books with a structure, and this delivers in spades. The author and his wife travel around the country in search of the meaning of towns with names like "Bliss" and "Comfort". How did they get their names? Do they live up to them?

Read and find out.

[Kim Garner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for book club many years ago when it was hyped up on Oprah...don't let that fool you, it was a great read. Thought of this book when I was looking at a review of the book Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this while on vacation. I drove by Troy ... but not the Troy that Herzog visited. Besides, that was his last book. They're sort of melting together for me. Ah well. I love his writing.

I wrote about it here: http://deepmuckbigrake.com/2011/08/26....

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a 2.5. Interesting concept but never really engaged me. We never learn very much about Brad or his wife. Some of the towns and people were interesting, others were rather depressing. None stand out now that I've finished reading the book.

[Carrie]

books I've read,travel narratives

[Katya Cengel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great journey in words and wonder.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a 3.5. I really liked the stories here, especially the history portions.

[Tanya Procknow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book but slowed down as it went. It would be a great thing to do.