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A 50-State Journey to Rediscover American Democracy

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

Ryan Bernsten’s 50 States of Mind: A Journey to Rediscover American Democracy is not the book I expected.

It is advertised as a followup to Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville’s nine-month tour of America in 1831 that examined why democracy worked here. That trip resulted in the classic two-volume Democracy in America, required reading in political science programs across the United States.

Bernsten’s five-month tour to all 50 states is a lighter look than I expected, but weighs in with answers to serious questions about the direction of America. Are we hopelessly divided? Or are there common threads that bind us? How do Americans really feel?

Bernsten drives his Prius to large cities, small towns and places between. He listens, learns, and relates the stories and moods of Americans, from civic leaders to the homeless. Laughs and entertaining vignettes are included aplenty.

50 States is a story of hope, rooted in the author’s open-minded approach. A member of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff in the 2016 presidential race, Bernsten hears a plethora of reasons voters were drawn to the Trump campaign. He wonders why more of us don’t listen to folks who have views different from ours.

The book is an adventure story and a report of his personal journey. Traveling on a tight budget, he stays with friends, relatives, and strangers. He couch surfs. A catalogue of his hosts would make interesting reading on its own. He is alone much of the way, but his passenger seat is taken for a while by a prospective love interest. Later, a former college roommate joins him, breaking up times that he admits sometimes turn lonely.

Bernsten studied creative writing at Northwestern University and Oxford University, where he earned a master’s degree. He has won awards as a playwright and is now senior managing editor at The Trevor Project, which works to end suicide among LGBTQ young people.

He admits he was burning out toward the end of his journey, but, as a reader, I wanted him to slow down and conduct more random interviews.

The trip and book were brilliant ideas that convinced Ryan Bernsten and this reader that there are reasons for hope for democracy in America.

Bicycling Crusader Follows the Silk Road

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

She climbed to a peak of academia as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University and later as a scientist/graduate student at MIT. She dreamed of walking on Mars.

But for Kate Harris, work inside science laboratories could not satisfy her need to discover, so she and her best friend Mel set out to get lost in the world of exploration–for a year, bicycling the Silk Road of Marco Polo from Turkey to Tibet.

Thousands of miles, at altitudes higher than 17,000 feet, over every kind of terrain you can imagine, and through blazing heat and freezing snow. They eluded and tricked menacing military and police, adapted to cultures as different as they could be, and traversed geography as foreign to them as Mars. They found human compassion in many places, including Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Tibet, and Nepal as locals took them into their homes to save them from another night in their tent.

In Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road, Harris eloquently and humorously weaves history, science, and compelling anecdotes from her adventure that left my jaw hanging open.

As I have learned while walking the long-distance trails of Europe, the borders of cultures, countries and languages are lost when you step outside the comforts of everyday life and push yourself to, or even beyond, your limits. On the Silk Road, Kate Harris went well beyond the limits of most humans and her book made me want to load up my backpack and leave my borders behind.

(Click on the cover if you want to see the book on Amazon.)