A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

W hat happened in North America between Columbus's sail in 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620?

On a visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he doesn't have a clue, nor do most Americans. So he sets off across the continent to rediscover the wild era when Europeans first roamed the New World in quest of gold, glory, converts, and eternal youth. Horwitz tells the story of these brave and often crazed explorers while retracing their steps on his own epic trek--an odyssey that takes him inside an Indian sweat lodge in subarctic Canada, down the Mississippi in a canoe, on a road trip fueled by buffalo meat, and into sixty pounds of armor as a conquistador reenactor in Florida.

A Voyage Long and Strange is a rich mix of scholarship and modern-day adventure that brings the forgotten first chapter of America's history vividly to life.

Tony Horwitz was a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a native of Washington, D.C. He spent a decade as a newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, primarily reporting conflicts and violence for The Wall Street Journal. When he returned to the United States, he earned the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked for The New Yorker before deciding to pursue writing full-time. Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Journey Long and Weird are among his national and New York Times bestsellers. In 2011, the New York Times designated Midnight Rising a Notable Book, and Library Journal named it one of the top ten books of the year.

Tony was also the president of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. His wife Geraldine Brooks and their two kids Nathaniel and Bizu survive him. He died in May 2019.