This classic account of self discovery and railroad life describes Linda Grant Niemann's travels as an itinerant brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Boomer combines travelogue, Wild West adventure, sexual memoir, and closely observed ethnography. A Berkeley Ph.D., Niemann turned her back on academia and set out to master the craft of railroad brakeman, beginning a journey of sexual and subcultural exploration and traveling down a path toward recovery from alcoholism. In honest, clean prose, Niemann treks off the beaten path and into the forgotten places along the rail lines, finding true American characters with colorful pasts-and her true self as well.

One woman's unconventional path to self-discovery

About the Author

Linda Grant Niemann teaches creative nonfiction at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. She is author of Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century (IUP, 2010).

Reviews

Niemann has a taut, lyrically restrained but vividly descriptive style, with an observational vigilance befitting a brakeman's mindset, and her narrative clips along like a boxcar rolling through the yard. June/July 2011

* Bloom Magazine *

Boomer is a fascinating mix of fact, history, self-confession, self-accusation, and self-forgiveness-a diary of both emotional relationships and travel.

* Pasatiempo *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253222831
Author Linda G. Niemann
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 431g