MARK JENKINS is global correspondent for Rodale magazines and a former monthly columnist for Outside magazine. Besides writing the critically acclaimed books A Man's Life, The Hard Way, and To Timbuktu, Jenkins is featured in Best American Travel Writing and has written for Men's Health, Backpacker, Time, the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, and other media. When he's not off adventuring, he lives in Laramie, Wyoming.
What's it like bicycling in a police state? In 1989, Jenkins found out by joining a team of three Americans and four Russians in the first expedition to cross Siberia by bicycle, via Vladivostok to Leningrad. Jenkins, the Rocky Mountain editor for Backpacker magazine and the field editor for Summit magazine, re-creates his excitement and trepidation over the sheer vastness of the task. The team slogs through an 800-mile swamp and climbs passes over the Ural mountains, enduring dirt roads, mud, and icy rain. While the Siberian journey is adventure reading par excellence, flashbacks celebrating the autonomy afforded kids on bikes are powerful stuff. Recommended for public libraries.-- Elizabeth Skinner, Forsyth Cty. P.L., Winston-Salem, N.C.
"Mark Jenkins smuggled a well-crafted literary epic into his account of a Guinness record-setting bicycle adventure."--USA Today "An epic tour of one of earth's most forbidding and legendary regions . . .The prose of Off the Map is as audacious as the journey."--The San Francisco Chronicle "The ornery, observant Jenkins [is] good company on every page."--Newsweek "A great whirring dream of a prose poem."--The Guardian (London) "Jenkins is a master of the fundamental writer's talent: an ability to see things in new ways, as no one has ever seen them before."--Robert Pirsig, author, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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