The Next Better Place: A Memoir in Miles | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael C. Keith
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $32.95
Buy New: $0.99
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 566428
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 5
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 4.4 x 2.1
ISBN: 1565117433
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.8742
EAN: 9781565117433
ASIN: 1565117433
Publication Date: January 13, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
At the age of eleven, Michael Keith left a stable life with his mother and sisters and set off to cross the country with his irresponsible hobo of a father--a real bum. The memoir, narrated without sentimentality by this funny, world-wise little boy, describes their life on the road--the characters they meet hitching rides, their adventures with bed bugs in Salvation Army bunks, the joys of finally encountering a decent meal, and the periods when Michael's father works odd jobs to make enough money for them to move on. Despite their sad, dysfunctional life, real love exists between them. The Next Better Place explores the thin line between wanderlust and compulsion, between running away and arriving, and leaves us with the understanding that the journey is often more powerful than the destination.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 A Fascinating Book February 3, 2008
This is a wonderful book. "A road trip with an alcoholic father and a child? Must be a downer," you'd think. Not so. Never sliding into self-pity, the author just lays out a personal cross-country saga in mesmerizing detail. At times heartbreaking, this book is ultimately an inspirational story of survival by a child who deserved better. I've read a lot of travel narratives, and this is as good as they come.
Thumps up! July 25, 2005
This wonderful hitchhiking odyssey is all thumps up (or outstretched as the young boy would tell us). What a romp across 1960 America. It's the kind of book I'd love to see as a movie. Sure lends itself to the big screen because I have read few more visual stories. This is fun all the way to California and back! What a roll of the camera . . . and sentence.
 Can't be true December 26, 2004
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
I would normally give this book 5 stars, except I have a strong sense that this book is a fictional fraud.
It's the story of an 11 year old boy who hitchikes the country with his alcoholic, dead-beat father in search of a better life in California. Of course, California is no better than any other place they've been and they take buses back to Albany where his mother lives with his two sisters, only to ***spoiler*** go back out on the road again with his father at the end of the book.
The book is well written and engaging, but only if the book is true, which I doubt. The book often states what a good storyteller the father is and how good said father is at making up things to get what he wants out of people. The author continually expresses his desire to be on the radio or in movies, not to mention how often he embellishes stories, so I wouldn't be surprised if the book was just one big lie.
From the outset, the author states how he went 2 entire months without a bowel movement, which I don't even know is medically possible, much less didn't land him in the hospital. Plus he recounts in great detail names, places, and events that happened 40 years ago. And somehow, all these events involve sexual predators, thieves, and other ne'er-do-well's. Never any average people. Nah, I don't think the book is true.
But if it is true, it's really well done.
A Triumph of Memory, a Tempest of Imagination December 7, 2003
Smiling ghosts of Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac hover over many pages of Michael Keith's "The Next Better Place." This captivating book places Keith squarely in the same row with America's finest writers of the road adventure story. Which is to say that "The Next Better Place" is so much more than a memoir-cum-novel of a precocious son traversing America's great expanses with an ageing picaro of a father. Keith knows when to embroider his book's perfectly intoned dialogue, tremulous details, and charming teenage bravado with both lyrical pathos and hints at the perverse. The greatest American road novel, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," also came to mind as I devoured Keith's book, and I can only hope that Keith will soon reward his readers with another one.
the next better place April 21, 2003
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I ENJOYED THIS BOOK VERY MUCH,HOWEVER I'M A LITTLE CONFUSED ABOUT MR. KEITH'S DATES. HE SAYS THESE EVENTS TOOK PLACE IN 1959, WHEN HE WAS 11 YEARS OLD. HOWEVER ON THE "AUTHORS NOTE" PAGE IT GIVES HIS YEAR OF BIRTH AS 1945, WHICH WOULD HAVE MADE HIM 14 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME OF THESE EVENTS. ALSO HE MENTIONS SEVERAL TIMES THE SONG FROM THE MOVIE "THE MAGNIFICANT 7". HOWEVER THAT MOVIE WASNT RELEASED TILL THE EARLY 1960'S. NO BIG DEAL. JUST BAD PROOF READING BY THE PUBLISHERS.
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