As Far as You Can Go Without a Passport: Views from the End of the Road

Tom Bodett, humorist, radio star, and pitchman for Motel 6, lives and writes in Homer, Alaska, the little town in the blue Northwest where America stops, carwise. "If you got into your car in New York, " he said, "and wanted to take a nice long drive, I mean the longest drive you could without turning around or running into a foreign language, this is where you'd wind up." It's a place of moose and salmon and spectacular sunsets, but, Bodet insists, it's also small-town America, a place not all that different from the Michigan town of his youth. That's why he's made it his everyday, for the rigors of the outdoor life and the mundane joys of the family circle. "As Far As You Can Go Without a Passport, " Bodett's first collection of casual essays, contains pieces on eveything from trapping, tree cutting, and halilbut fishing, to soap operas, lost socks, and sleeping in. It's guaranteed to please both the renegate and the homebody in every reader.