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Idiot Wind
In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence.
Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of a new life, the harsh reality of vagrancy forces him to face up to his past, from his time in Rikers prison to relationships lost and lamented.
Kaldheim hikes and buses through an America rarely seen, and his encounters with a disparate collection of characters instills in him a new empathy and wisdom, as he journeys on a road less traveled.
Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of a new life, the harsh reality of vagrancy forces him to face up to his past, from his time in Rikers prison to relationships lost and lamented.
Kaldheim hikes and buses through an America rarely seen, and his encounters with a disparate collection of characters instills in him a new empathy and wisdom, as he journeys on a road less traveled.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2019
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479 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
June 26, 2019
Ah, I really loved this unique memoir. Peter Kaldheim graduated from Dartmouth, got married and had a successful career in publishing. But, by 37, he'd been divorced, widowed, professionally disgraced, jailed and was addicted to cocaine.
On a snowy Superbowl night 1987 - and owing his dealer a cool $2k - he ran away from it all. What follows is this extraordinary memoir of tramping across the US. Hitchhiking, jumping freight trains, selling blood, flop houses and food stamps - Kaldheim spent four months doing it all, always seeking his personal redemption.
This is a book which owes a lot to two Jack's - Kerouac and London - whose stories of the road are classics of American literature and, concerning Kerouac in particular, a hero to Kaldheim.
By turns tender, funny, tough and honest, Kaldheim has written a book which shows us the best and worst of life on the road in the good ol' US of A.
On a snowy Superbowl night 1987 - and owing his dealer a cool $2k - he ran away from it all. What follows is this extraordinary memoir of tramping across the US. Hitchhiking, jumping freight trains, selling blood, flop houses and food stamps - Kaldheim spent four months doing it all, always seeking his personal redemption.
This is a book which owes a lot to two Jack's - Kerouac and London - whose stories of the road are classics of American literature and, concerning Kerouac in particular, a hero to Kaldheim.
By turns tender, funny, tough and honest, Kaldheim has written a book which shows us the best and worst of life on the road in the good ol' US of A.
October 17, 2019
Idiot Wind is part travelogue, part memoir, and part cautionary tale. It's also very absorbing and enjoyable.
Despite gaining an Ivy League education, Peter Kaldheim became an addict and ultimately a homeless coke dealer in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s.
When he is forced to flee New York after being unable to pay back his unsympathetic and violent mob-affiliated drug dealer he becomes a down and out. Hitching across the USA, sleeping rough, or in hostels and flophouses.
In common with Down and Out in Paris and London and On the Road, two books Peter Kaldheim explicitly references, the results are very readable, interesting, humorous and ultimately life reaffirming.
There's a lot of hard earned wisdom in these pages and a reminder that our worst fears sometimes aren't as bad as we imagine they might be, and redemption is always possible.
4/5
Despite gaining an Ivy League education, Peter Kaldheim became an addict and ultimately a homeless coke dealer in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s.
When he is forced to flee New York after being unable to pay back his unsympathetic and violent mob-affiliated drug dealer he becomes a down and out. Hitching across the USA, sleeping rough, or in hostels and flophouses.
In common with Down and Out in Paris and London and On the Road, two books Peter Kaldheim explicitly references, the results are very readable, interesting, humorous and ultimately life reaffirming.
There's a lot of hard earned wisdom in these pages and a reminder that our worst fears sometimes aren't as bad as we imagine they might be, and redemption is always possible.
4/5
March 16, 2020
*kindly gifted to me by Canongate*
I was completely absorbed into this as soon as I started reading it! Peter’s story is inspiring, but also shows how far someone can fall off the path they are trying to take.
Once he hits the road, I was really rooting for him as he started to change his life around, and I found that this was really easy to put down and start up again thanks to his easy writing style.
Definitely not a book I would normally pick up, but one I’m glad I did!
I was completely absorbed into this as soon as I started reading it! Peter’s story is inspiring, but also shows how far someone can fall off the path they are trying to take.
Once he hits the road, I was really rooting for him as he started to change his life around, and I found that this was really easy to put down and start up again thanks to his easy writing style.
Definitely not a book I would normally pick up, but one I’m glad I did!
February 27, 2023
"Me limitaba a intentar sobrevivir y no podía culpar a nadie de mi situación más que a mí mismo y a mis cómplices: el alcohol, la cocaína, y una prolongada racha de lo que mi antiguo profesor de filosofía griega habría denominado akrasia: una fisura en la fuerza de voluntad que te lleva a actuar justo en contra de lo que dicta el sentido común. Si la filosofía griega no es lo tuyo, te diré que Bob Dylan también habló de ello. Lo denominó «el viento idiota» (idiot wind). Así es como yo lo denomino."
Así explica el autor el motivo que lo llevó a destruir su vida. Con una prosa desenfadada, sin dramas, sin victimismo alguno, el autor recorre el camino que lo llevó a tocar fondo y a tener que subir a base de sudar (y vender) sangre.
Es una historia personal, una biografía, un viaje como autoestopista para cruzar EEUU huyendo de una vida destruida por ese viento idiota que son las malas decisiones. Entonando el mea culpa sin hacerse sangre con un realismo, y sin flagelarse, tal como cabría esperar. Puede que le sobren detalles, lo cuenta todo, y hasta le sobran páginas pero una vida da para rellenar muchas páginas y el volcó su memoria en unos diarios que le han permitido llegar a este libro. Un viaje además rodeado de referencias literarias que lo han acompañado toda la vida porque si algo tuvo claro este hombre es que la literatura era terapia, era una vía de escape al entorno agreste en el que se movía.
Un libro que me ha mantenido muchos días leyendo a pesar de ser una lectura ligera sin complicaciones pero tampoco es un libro trepidante, es una lectura pausada, a veces dolorosa, aun sin la expresión de grandes emociones. Recomendable para la gente que le gusten las historias personales de superación, las autobiografías, las historias en primera persona.
Así explica el autor el motivo que lo llevó a destruir su vida. Con una prosa desenfadada, sin dramas, sin victimismo alguno, el autor recorre el camino que lo llevó a tocar fondo y a tener que subir a base de sudar (y vender) sangre.
Es una historia personal, una biografía, un viaje como autoestopista para cruzar EEUU huyendo de una vida destruida por ese viento idiota que son las malas decisiones. Entonando el mea culpa sin hacerse sangre con un realismo, y sin flagelarse, tal como cabría esperar. Puede que le sobren detalles, lo cuenta todo, y hasta le sobran páginas pero una vida da para rellenar muchas páginas y el volcó su memoria en unos diarios que le han permitido llegar a este libro. Un viaje además rodeado de referencias literarias que lo han acompañado toda la vida porque si algo tuvo claro este hombre es que la literatura era terapia, era una vía de escape al entorno agreste en el que se movía.
Un libro que me ha mantenido muchos días leyendo a pesar de ser una lectura ligera sin complicaciones pero tampoco es un libro trepidante, es una lectura pausada, a veces dolorosa, aun sin la expresión de grandes emociones. Recomendable para la gente que le gusten las historias personales de superación, las autobiografías, las historias en primera persona.
February 19, 2021
Judging a book by the time it takes you to read is probably a bit crude to be a valid system but six days for me is pretty quick. Its good and it's interesting. Books like this should really be a 5* but I feel I can only go 4* principally because I do not believe it. I do not mean that he is telling lies it's just he comes over as a loser who due to the 'Idiot Wind' a phenomenon that is live and kicking today with Brexit which is an idiot wind of an idea if I have even begun to understand the concept.
He is not a loser he is an intelligent well connected and likable individual who ran into problems and used his abilities and connections to come good. I have little experience of people in this situation but the ones I see are not articulate, they are not connected and they certainly likable. I do not see many of the ones hanging around town in the cold coming good and regaining high paid jobs and respect. But then again they do not wright interesting competent books.
Guardian review that inspired me.
Peter Kaldheim begins his story in a part of Penn Station familiar to New York daytrippers and passengers stuck in long layovers: the luggage lockers. Three decades ago he used one of these lockers to store all his belongings. He was broke, unemployed and homeless in the city. His life, he writes, had become “only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia – a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement”.
Born to working-class parents in Brooklyn, he had graduated from Dartmouth. At 22, he was married to his high-school girlfriend and working as a copy editor at Harcourt Brace in New York. He dreamed of publishing his first novel by the time he was 25. But there is a rift between one’s dreams and one’s deeds that Kaldheim tried to bridge by staying past happy hour every evening in the West Village. His wife left him after she found out he had been cheating. He quit Harcourt and became an acquisitions editor at another publishing firm. The new job came with a pay rise that he again squandered on his drinking. He developed a taste for speed and cocaine, and resigned from his job after spectacularly failing to meet a deadline. Kaldheim landed in prison in Rikers Island after selling coke to an undercover agent. He got married again and lost his wife to a brain aneurysm during a trial separation. By the time he was homeless in his mid-30s, he was spending his nights hopping from bar to bar, drinking and “freelance dealing”. When he realised he was too deep in debt to a violent drug boss, he decided to get out of the city. He abandoned all his clothes in the locker at Penn Station, fleeced a customer for cash one last time and caught a Greyhound bus to Richmond, Virginia, even as a terrible blizzard kept other New Yorkers indoors.
Kaldheim shows his influences: he reads Kerouac’s On the Road and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in libraries
Idiot Wind is Kaldheim’s record of that escape from New York, a journey that ends, eight months and 5,000 miles later, when he finds a job at last as a cook in Montana. Along the way, he lives from one meal to the next, hitching rides across 20 state lines, hopping trains, donating blood plasma for cash, scrounging for leftovers in bins, spending countless nights in the open. He isn’t shy about making his influences apparent – during stopovers, he reads Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in public libraries – but the book is animated by Kaldheim’s resolution that his dissolute days are behind him. In Richmond he meets a single mother working through her drug habit to regain custody of her daughter. He drives around a town all night in North Carolina with an heir to a property fortune relapsing from his medication. A Vietnam-era veteran reveals his battle scars to Kaldheim when he sees traffic helicopters hovering around a road accident. He hitchhikes across the Mississippi with a teenager who has run away from home after losing his mother to cancer.
These encounters are not cautionary tales. To Kaldheim, they reinforce a sense of fellowship that he realises he had been hankering after in New York. Acts of both unexpected kindness and lingering bitterness offer him a conceivably headier fix: the romance of being involved, however fleetingly, in someone else’s life. The people he runs into on the road are also recovering in one way or another. Wars, drugs and years of economic turmoil have simultaneously opened up and narrowed their worlds. The uncertainty is embodied in the movies they seem to like, including those by Nicholas Ray and David Lynch. Their music – Bob Dylan, ZZ Top, Rahsaan Roland Kirk – reflects back to them their self-image of being constantly at a sort of crossroads in their lives.
Although it is a memoir set in the Reagan years, the milieu still feels so contemporary. We know those cheap windowless hotel rooms that come furnished with a “sagging bed” and the “obligatory four-drawer dresser, with two missing drawer-pulls and a cherrywood top whose edges were deckled black with cigarette burns”. We’ve noticed the “freelance dealers” who wander from bar to bar looking desperate every night. Cashless, and without a place to go, we’ve all spent some mornings in public libraries. For those vulnerable and stranded in the US, certain things appear to have remained unchanged. Too many of us still have to resort to the Penn Station luggage lockers.
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty
Tue 10 Dec 2019 10.00 GMT
He is not a loser he is an intelligent well connected and likable individual who ran into problems and used his abilities and connections to come good. I have little experience of people in this situation but the ones I see are not articulate, they are not connected and they certainly likable. I do not see many of the ones hanging around town in the cold coming good and regaining high paid jobs and respect. But then again they do not wright interesting competent books.
Guardian review that inspired me.
Peter Kaldheim begins his story in a part of Penn Station familiar to New York daytrippers and passengers stuck in long layovers: the luggage lockers. Three decades ago he used one of these lockers to store all his belongings. He was broke, unemployed and homeless in the city. His life, he writes, had become “only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia – a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement”.
Born to working-class parents in Brooklyn, he had graduated from Dartmouth. At 22, he was married to his high-school girlfriend and working as a copy editor at Harcourt Brace in New York. He dreamed of publishing his first novel by the time he was 25. But there is a rift between one’s dreams and one’s deeds that Kaldheim tried to bridge by staying past happy hour every evening in the West Village. His wife left him after she found out he had been cheating. He quit Harcourt and became an acquisitions editor at another publishing firm. The new job came with a pay rise that he again squandered on his drinking. He developed a taste for speed and cocaine, and resigned from his job after spectacularly failing to meet a deadline. Kaldheim landed in prison in Rikers Island after selling coke to an undercover agent. He got married again and lost his wife to a brain aneurysm during a trial separation. By the time he was homeless in his mid-30s, he was spending his nights hopping from bar to bar, drinking and “freelance dealing”. When he realised he was too deep in debt to a violent drug boss, he decided to get out of the city. He abandoned all his clothes in the locker at Penn Station, fleeced a customer for cash one last time and caught a Greyhound bus to Richmond, Virginia, even as a terrible blizzard kept other New Yorkers indoors.
Kaldheim shows his influences: he reads Kerouac’s On the Road and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in libraries
Idiot Wind is Kaldheim’s record of that escape from New York, a journey that ends, eight months and 5,000 miles later, when he finds a job at last as a cook in Montana. Along the way, he lives from one meal to the next, hitching rides across 20 state lines, hopping trains, donating blood plasma for cash, scrounging for leftovers in bins, spending countless nights in the open. He isn’t shy about making his influences apparent – during stopovers, he reads Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in public libraries – but the book is animated by Kaldheim’s resolution that his dissolute days are behind him. In Richmond he meets a single mother working through her drug habit to regain custody of her daughter. He drives around a town all night in North Carolina with an heir to a property fortune relapsing from his medication. A Vietnam-era veteran reveals his battle scars to Kaldheim when he sees traffic helicopters hovering around a road accident. He hitchhikes across the Mississippi with a teenager who has run away from home after losing his mother to cancer.
These encounters are not cautionary tales. To Kaldheim, they reinforce a sense of fellowship that he realises he had been hankering after in New York. Acts of both unexpected kindness and lingering bitterness offer him a conceivably headier fix: the romance of being involved, however fleetingly, in someone else’s life. The people he runs into on the road are also recovering in one way or another. Wars, drugs and years of economic turmoil have simultaneously opened up and narrowed their worlds. The uncertainty is embodied in the movies they seem to like, including those by Nicholas Ray and David Lynch. Their music – Bob Dylan, ZZ Top, Rahsaan Roland Kirk – reflects back to them their self-image of being constantly at a sort of crossroads in their lives.
Although it is a memoir set in the Reagan years, the milieu still feels so contemporary. We know those cheap windowless hotel rooms that come furnished with a “sagging bed” and the “obligatory four-drawer dresser, with two missing drawer-pulls and a cherrywood top whose edges were deckled black with cigarette burns”. We’ve noticed the “freelance dealers” who wander from bar to bar looking desperate every night. Cashless, and without a place to go, we’ve all spent some mornings in public libraries. For those vulnerable and stranded in the US, certain things appear to have remained unchanged. Too many of us still have to resort to the Penn Station luggage lockers.
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty
Tue 10 Dec 2019 10.00 GMT
September 12, 2019
There’s division about the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind but one interpretation is that it’s about despair and depression caused by loss, and how individuals cope. Dylan’s himself had just gone through a bitter divorce. Kaldheim’s quotes it as what his old "Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia, a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement."
Peter Kaldheim, an Ivy League graduate, refers to the song, and to Kerouac and Orwell in telling his own story of taking to the road after owing thousands of dollars in cocaine debts in New York and his tramp across America as a hobo and the misery and occasional lighter moments experienced sleeping rough and in homeless shelters.
A child of the Sixties, the author tempers his romance of the road with some brutal reality and maintains some dignity in the worst of circumstances by keeping notes in an empty bread bag and referring to himself, when necessary, as a writer.
Someone's got it in for me
They're planting stories in the press
Idiot wind
Blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Peter Kaldheim, an Ivy League graduate, refers to the song, and to Kerouac and Orwell in telling his own story of taking to the road after owing thousands of dollars in cocaine debts in New York and his tramp across America as a hobo and the misery and occasional lighter moments experienced sleeping rough and in homeless shelters.
A child of the Sixties, the author tempers his romance of the road with some brutal reality and maintains some dignity in the worst of circumstances by keeping notes in an empty bread bag and referring to himself, when necessary, as a writer.
Read
August 6, 2019Here’s my review on NPR Books. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746216...
August 8, 2019
Pete "The Hat" Kaldheim skips out of New York to avoid a debt owed to a coke dealer nicknamed "Bobby Bats," who derived his nickname from his fondness for using baseball bats to extract payments from deadbeats. With very little advance planning, Kaldheim sets out with the clothes on his back, virtually no money, and no prospects for food, shelter, or work. Most of the book takes place in the six-month period when Kadlheim wends his way from New York to Seattle via Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Portland.
Like "Travels with Lizbeth" by Lars Eighner, "Idiot Wind" brings into sharp focus life as a homeless person, which for many (myself included) is an abstraction.
Like "Travels with Lizbeth" by Lars Eighner, "Idiot Wind" brings into sharp focus life as a homeless person, which for many (myself included) is an abstraction.
February 18, 2020
I loved this SO MUCH. I didn’t want it to end. Right up there with Kerouac and Bukowski.
February 20, 2020
Correcto, bien escrito, con algunos detalles "no muy vistos" y, aún así, no me ha interesado nada.
April 30, 2021
Com'è triste lasciare Pete e il suo viaggio! Quando mi sono accorta che stavamo per separarci mi sono messa a piangere.
Questa è la storia vera di un uomo che ha perso tutto: la casa, il lavoro, la famiglia, e anche "la retta via" per sua stessa ammissione. Dopo aver incassato debiti causati dallo spaccio di cocaina, Pete è costretto a fuggire da New York.
Il suo viaggio in autostop attraverso gli Stati Uniti durerà mesi e lo porterà dalle calde temperature della Florida alla piovosa Portland fino a spostarsi nuovamente più a nord.
Il viaggio di Pete non è solo fisico, ma anche metaforico: è ricco di riflessioni sul senso della vita, su cosa significa essere un senza tetto, sulla fede cattolica che lo ha portato alle sue scelte, sulla carità, sull'aiuto reciproco tra persone che non hanno nulla.
Mi hanno colpito lo stile dell'autore, il suo coraggio, la sua forza. E' emozionante leggere di un senzatetto laureato in lettere, che quando mette da parte qualche moneta, la utilizza per acquistare "Senza un soldo a Londra e Parigi" di George Orwell. L'amore per la letteratura sarà il filo conduttore di tutto il memoir, e i consigli di grandi come Orwell, Joyce e Kerouac lo aiuteranno a trovare finalmente la sua strada. Perché queste sono le sue memorie, scritte trent'anni dopo averle vissute, ma è anche e sopratutto un romanzo di formazione.
Questa è la storia vera di un uomo che ha perso tutto: la casa, il lavoro, la famiglia, e anche "la retta via" per sua stessa ammissione. Dopo aver incassato debiti causati dallo spaccio di cocaina, Pete è costretto a fuggire da New York.
Il suo viaggio in autostop attraverso gli Stati Uniti durerà mesi e lo porterà dalle calde temperature della Florida alla piovosa Portland fino a spostarsi nuovamente più a nord.
Il viaggio di Pete non è solo fisico, ma anche metaforico: è ricco di riflessioni sul senso della vita, su cosa significa essere un senza tetto, sulla fede cattolica che lo ha portato alle sue scelte, sulla carità, sull'aiuto reciproco tra persone che non hanno nulla.
Mi hanno colpito lo stile dell'autore, il suo coraggio, la sua forza. E' emozionante leggere di un senzatetto laureato in lettere, che quando mette da parte qualche moneta, la utilizza per acquistare "Senza un soldo a Londra e Parigi" di George Orwell. L'amore per la letteratura sarà il filo conduttore di tutto il memoir, e i consigli di grandi come Orwell, Joyce e Kerouac lo aiuteranno a trovare finalmente la sua strada. Perché queste sono le sue memorie, scritte trent'anni dopo averle vissute, ma è anche e sopratutto un romanzo di formazione.
May 10, 2020
-On the night I escaped from the land of giants, I set off into a blizzard I feared would soon make the roads completely impassable.
A Dartmouth graduate with all the advantages except the kind that teaches you how to persevere when things don't go your way - sooner or later, they don't. I remember these guys in the 80s and 90s, I was jealous of how well-read they were, of their university educations, of the ease with which they appeared to build their lives, gliding from one seminal moment to another. I was also surprised when life's eventual disappointments threw them off their game, and New York City is a hazardous place when you become susceptible to its many distractions.
He relates his story as he makes an escape from New York via a late night Greyhound, on his last dollar - actually, a friend's last dollar - Dylan's "idiot wind" at his back. (I also remember being that friend.) Idiot wind, the result of the Greek "akrasia", the 'stupid' wind of consequences pushing you along a path of self-destruction, stupid because it is largely the result of your own bad choices.
I think Peter Kaldheim had a better road trip account in him than the one he published - or perhaps a better (longer?) draft than the publisher allowed him. I would like to have spent more time with some of the characters he meets along the way, more time on the literary asides he faintly indulges in, more time with his own personal history that got him there, perhaps a little less time with the itinerary.
The book has personal meaning to me, not least because I am wrestling with my own version of a NY memoir of joys & struggles, friends I lost, characters I met along the way. If not as rich as Kerouc's or Orwell's - favorites I share with him - still, it's a good yarn, and one of the very few stories of New York (fictional or not) that describe the city I knew - Scorcese's, not Woody's.
And when the only criticism is that you would have liked to have more of what the scribe has brought to the table - bring the feast please, not brunch - well then he's pulled off something pretty damn worthy.
A Dartmouth graduate with all the advantages except the kind that teaches you how to persevere when things don't go your way - sooner or later, they don't. I remember these guys in the 80s and 90s, I was jealous of how well-read they were, of their university educations, of the ease with which they appeared to build their lives, gliding from one seminal moment to another. I was also surprised when life's eventual disappointments threw them off their game, and New York City is a hazardous place when you become susceptible to its many distractions.
He relates his story as he makes an escape from New York via a late night Greyhound, on his last dollar - actually, a friend's last dollar - Dylan's "idiot wind" at his back. (I also remember being that friend.) Idiot wind, the result of the Greek "akrasia", the 'stupid' wind of consequences pushing you along a path of self-destruction, stupid because it is largely the result of your own bad choices.
I think Peter Kaldheim had a better road trip account in him than the one he published - or perhaps a better (longer?) draft than the publisher allowed him. I would like to have spent more time with some of the characters he meets along the way, more time on the literary asides he faintly indulges in, more time with his own personal history that got him there, perhaps a little less time with the itinerary.
The book has personal meaning to me, not least because I am wrestling with my own version of a NY memoir of joys & struggles, friends I lost, characters I met along the way. If not as rich as Kerouc's or Orwell's - favorites I share with him - still, it's a good yarn, and one of the very few stories of New York (fictional or not) that describe the city I knew - Scorcese's, not Woody's.
And when the only criticism is that you would have liked to have more of what the scribe has brought to the table - bring the feast please, not brunch - well then he's pulled off something pretty damn worthy.
February 21, 2020
Detailed recap of his mid-30's hitchhike across the country to escape his NY life that drugs and drinking and debt had ruined. Compared it himself to Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. I'm not sure it was that good, but he is adept at vividly describing how tough it is to be homeless. He makes money by selling blood plasma and just generally scrambles day to day to get by [jumping on moving trains to get a ride to a possible job lead, etc.].
Had a bit of trouble laying off the "I went to Dartmouth, and it's particularly remarkable that this happened to ME" stuff. example in relation to McDonald's employees hassling homeless people who stay a long time to drink free coffee refills: "It was all so petty and unnecessary, but I must admit that it gave me daily confirmation that Claude Levi-Strauss got it right in Tristes Tropiques when he observed that a traveller's experience of any new place is inescapably coloured by his exact position in the social scale while he's there." (p. 248). Bonus points for the u in "coloured" for an American author.
Had a bit of trouble laying off the "I went to Dartmouth, and it's particularly remarkable that this happened to ME" stuff. example in relation to McDonald's employees hassling homeless people who stay a long time to drink free coffee refills: "It was all so petty and unnecessary, but I must admit that it gave me daily confirmation that Claude Levi-Strauss got it right in Tristes Tropiques when he observed that a traveller's experience of any new place is inescapably coloured by his exact position in the social scale while he's there." (p. 248). Bonus points for the u in "coloured" for an American author.
March 7, 2021
Il vento idiota di Peter Kaldheim è un memoir che racconta la storia di un tossicodipendente e spacciatore che fugge da New York dopo aver truffato il suo fornitore.
L'idea di partenza è pratica, dettata dal puro istinto di conservazione e debolmente ispirata all'idea del viaggio in stile Kerouac. Le premesse sono sconfortanti ma, man mano che si legge, il libro di Peter assume note da romanzo in cui l'America miserabile e altruista scorre aiutando il narratore a sopravvivere e, infine, a guadagnare un equilibrio con sé stesso.
Non entusiasmante ma comunque piacevole, scorrevole e meritevole del beneficio e dell'opportunità di essere letto per quello che è, un memoir aderente alle tematiche affrontate da scrittori come Kerouac, Steinbeck, Orwell e altri.
Altri appunti a riguardo su:
https://paroleombra.com/2021/01/29/il...
L'idea di partenza è pratica, dettata dal puro istinto di conservazione e debolmente ispirata all'idea del viaggio in stile Kerouac. Le premesse sono sconfortanti ma, man mano che si legge, il libro di Peter assume note da romanzo in cui l'America miserabile e altruista scorre aiutando il narratore a sopravvivere e, infine, a guadagnare un equilibrio con sé stesso.
Non entusiasmante ma comunque piacevole, scorrevole e meritevole del beneficio e dell'opportunità di essere letto per quello che è, un memoir aderente alle tematiche affrontate da scrittori come Kerouac, Steinbeck, Orwell e altri.
Altri appunti a riguardo su:
https://paroleombra.com/2021/01/29/il...
unfinished
December 22, 2019I requested this purely on the basis of an enthusiastic NPR review from an acquaintance. While there’s a lot of energy to this memoir of the author’s time as a New York City drug dealer/addict taking off on a cross-country road trip in the late 1980s, I should have known it wouldn’t be for me. I quit after 14 pages.
March 22, 2020
This was a fun read, a little monotonous at times but the second half picked up and I was really rooting for Pete by the end. You can easily sympathise with him although crazy at times was his behaviour but I could imagine one could easily slip down that slippery slope. It was an easy read and would appeal to all types of readers.
September 28, 2019
Awesome, heart warming read. I couldn't out this book down
October 6, 2019
Liked it a lot except for the rather strange fact that Pete, a longtime and committed cokehead, seemed to have no withdrawal symptoms. Can this be?
October 20, 2019
Initially this seemed to be all too similar to “on the road” by Jack Kerouac. Thankfully I stuck with it and enjoyed a beautiful, well written memoir.
August 9, 2020
El viento idiota es aquel que sopla en contra del sentido común y la racionalidad. Es un viento furibundo y destructivo que ataca a las personas de forma individualizada poniendo sus vidas del revés y haciéndolos completamente vulnerables. Es la historia de Pete The Hat, bajo cuyo mote está Peter Kaldheim, el autor de esta estupenda autobiografía novelada.
Narrada en primera persona, destila honestidad y realismo. Es, por otra parte un exorcismo, mediante el cual, Kaldheim busca hacer las paces consigo mismo y con las personas a las que el viento idiota, que le azotó durante unos años, provocó también sufrimiento.
Una novela de carretera que, cómo otras del género (hay una referencia constante a En el camino de Kerouac) muestra muy bien un retrato hiper realista de la sociedad americana de finales del XX. Con sus cambios constantes de coche (el viaje en autoestop), de autobús o de tren, a través de un sinfín de ciudades y personajes, el autor nos cuenta su azarosa vida personal.
El viento idiota solo puede ser contrarrestado por otro viento favorable que no es otro que el viento de la determinación y el deseo. El viento también de la suerte, tan necesaria para cambiar el rumbo. Todo eso nos cuenta Peter Kaldheim, nos lo cuenta bien, muy bien.
Narrada en primera persona, destila honestidad y realismo. Es, por otra parte un exorcismo, mediante el cual, Kaldheim busca hacer las paces consigo mismo y con las personas a las que el viento idiota, que le azotó durante unos años, provocó también sufrimiento.
Una novela de carretera que, cómo otras del género (hay una referencia constante a En el camino de Kerouac) muestra muy bien un retrato hiper realista de la sociedad americana de finales del XX. Con sus cambios constantes de coche (el viaje en autoestop), de autobús o de tren, a través de un sinfín de ciudades y personajes, el autor nos cuenta su azarosa vida personal.
El viento idiota solo puede ser contrarrestado por otro viento favorable que no es otro que el viento de la determinación y el deseo. El viento también de la suerte, tan necesaria para cambiar el rumbo. Todo eso nos cuenta Peter Kaldheim, nos lo cuenta bien, muy bien.
April 24, 2023
This was a good road story. Pete the Hat definitely kept me engrossed as he traveled with nothing, learning how to survive in his trip across the country. And his kindness and compassion for the people he met, who helped him, and who we usually would avoid eye contact with, was great to read. He wrote about "tramps" with an understanding of their humanity which is so easy to lose if you've always had a roof over your head and a place to go.
I particularly loved the time in Portland since I have a connection there and the street names and places were familiar.
Found this book in a beach rental in Oregon and carted it home and I'm very glad I did. Hope he's making progress on the novel about Montana. I'd look forward to that.
I particularly loved the time in Portland since I have a connection there and the street names and places were familiar.
Found this book in a beach rental in Oregon and carted it home and I'm very glad I did. Hope he's making progress on the novel about Montana. I'd look forward to that.
April 13, 2021
Espectacular debut literario de Peter Kaldheim con una obra autobiográfica que te engancha desde el primer momento. Es muy difícil no empatizar con él como una suerte de antihéroe que ha tocado fondo tras caer en la aducción a la cocaína, el alcohol y no poder pagar a su camello después de perder a su mujer y su trabajo. Kaldheim narra toda su aventura para cruzar Estados Unidos partiendo desde Nueva York y todos los problemas a los que se va enfrentando. Te hace reflexionar sobre cómo una persona con buenos estudios, trabajo y mujer puede perderlo todo por culpa de malas decisiones hasta verse como un indigente.
February 8, 2020
Straightforward account of a homeless man's journey. Enjoyed the bonhomie amongst fellow homeless, how easy it is to fall into a friendship and support each other. Struck me that he never mentioned a female compatriot. He realised that this life in no way resembled Kerouac's 'On the Road' despite his poetic outlook. I do like the term 'idiot wind' and also his tutor's word '?akassia?' Can't remember but meaning behaviour that one carries out despite it being no good for them - addiction....not amazingly gripping but a decent read.
April 10, 2020
Muy interesante la vida del autor que debe salir de su ciudad , que ha destrozado su vida y perdido todo por culpa de sus adicciones.
Veremos como va haciendo autoestop para llegar a una ciudad donde le han ofrecido trabajo aunque al final decide llegar a otra ciudad donde cambia su vida para siempre.
Conoceremos cosas de las vidas de las personas con las que se cruza y comparte cosas.
Creo que el autor es muy generoso en su epílogo dándonos mucha información sobre su vida actual.
Merece mucho la pena leerlo kisses
Veremos como va haciendo autoestop para llegar a una ciudad donde le han ofrecido trabajo aunque al final decide llegar a otra ciudad donde cambia su vida para siempre.
Conoceremos cosas de las vidas de las personas con las que se cruza y comparte cosas.
Creo que el autor es muy generoso en su epílogo dándonos mucha información sobre su vida actual.
Merece mucho la pena leerlo kisses
February 26, 2023
At first I was unsure of how true this was after getting into the story but then remembered it took place back in late 1980’s so it made a lot more sense on how people were treated and how they acted/reacted. Today the story would be much different. I found the story a good read & interesting however throughout the book, many, many, many sentences started with the word “which” and they weren’t questions, just statements. That annoyed me as it’s doesn’t seem proper grammar. It was repeatedly done from start to finish. Regardless I have the book 5 stars as I did thoroughly enjoy it.
February 23, 2025
Non amo molto le storie di vita vera, soprattutto se hanno poco di esaltante e rimarcano quel quotidiano da cui a volte si cerca di scappare proprio leggendo. Nonostante tutto, riconosco all'autore uno sforzo enorme e un grande coraggio nell'aver ripercorso coi lettori questo viaggio che a tutti sembrerebbe disastrato, ma che, comunque, lui ha saputo raccontare con ironia. Libro noioso in alcuni punti. Ma la postfazione ripaga il sacrificio di aver sopportato le pagine precedenti. Commovente la citazione di Eliot, nell'ultima pagina. Chi viaggia molto, sa a cosa il poeta si riferisce.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 12, 2020
I appreciated this book tremendously. The author has a conversational and at the same time erudite style that engaged me. I lived in Portland, OR and Livingston, MT so it was nice for me to have my own experiences of the places he traveled. I think I might know some people in the Hyalite Blues band which gets a mention in the book!
When I started reading this book it didn't have any reviews on goodreads so it's great to see it getting some appreciation.
When I started reading this book it didn't have any reviews on goodreads so it's great to see it getting some appreciation.
September 21, 2020
Pete "The Protagonist" Kaldheim treads an unusual path on his hero's journey, for too long cursed by the idiot wind of the title.
Kaldheim introduces us to range of interesting characters and challenging circumstances as he travels from east to west coast USA, all the while retaining a deep humanity while retelling his tale.
Obviously no saint but I couldn't help finding myself in his corner the whole way.
Kaldheim introduces us to range of interesting characters and challenging circumstances as he travels from east to west coast USA, all the while retaining a deep humanity while retelling his tale.
Obviously no saint but I couldn't help finding myself in his corner the whole way.
March 26, 2022
I wanted to really like this book. It has some good moments for sure. But the shift from being the drug user/seller in fear of his life, to the life as a tramp who wants to write a novel all the while thinking he is in some "On The Road" classic adventure, is a big one. As well, the last chapters just rush by so fast after earlier chapters focus on every little detail of surviving on the streets. This could have been so much better with a more careful shaping of the story.
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