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American OZ: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals: Hitchhiking From California to New York, Alaska to Mexico

American OZ: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals: Hitchhiking From California to New York, Alaska to Mexico

by Michael Sean Comerford
American OZ: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals: Hitchhiking From California to New York, Alaska to Mexico

American OZ: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals: Hitchhiking From California to New York, Alaska to Mexico

by Michael Sean Comerford

Overview

The real traveling carnival is in the pathos behind the scenes.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or neighborhood festival the same way again.

Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals.

He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last King of the Sideshows. An insult dunk tank clown is shot. Masked gunmen rob his carnival. And a young showman friend dies on the road.

It's a new classic American road story as he hitchhikes to shows in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, and Florida where he works in a freak show.

He becomes the #1 hitchhiker in the USA and a top agent at the State Fair of Texas.

He travels to the lawless foothills of Mexico to see the new face of the American carny. He exposes the truths about immigration, labor abuse, and living between two worlds.

Comerford finds carnival people seeking meaning and love in their lives, and the answers always seem to be somewhere down the road.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781952693014
Publisher: Comerford Publishing LLC
Publication date: 08/15/2020
Edition description: Large Print
Pages: 530
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.07(d)

About the Author

Michael Sean Comerford is a writer and Pulitzer Prize-nominated former international journalist who worked in Chicago, New York, Budapest, and Moscow. He's bicycled cross country three times and hitchhiked across America, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He's ridden freight trains and rounded-up cattle out West, studied Buddhism in the Himalayas, and won a heavyweight boxing championship in Ireland. He toured almost 100 countries, swam the headwaters of the Nile, fought off a hippo attack, and toured ecological disaster areas in the Amazon. Comerford's bylines have appeared in the Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald, Copley News Service, Budapest Sun, Budapest Business Journal and the Moscow Times. He lives in the Chicago area to be near his daughter Grace. He's promised her that he'll stay closer to home for a while.

Table of Contents

Carny, Immersion journalism; memoir, running away to the circus; Caste, hitchhiking the USA, Canada, Mexico; King of the Sideshows; P.T Barnum; New Journalism; labor; Mexican emigration and immigration; labor abuse; poverty; pop culture; W.C. Fields; immersion journalism; living condition; childhood memories; Ferris wheel; carousel; plush; race; cops; families; health care; climate change; run away to the circus; clowns; freaks; runaways; Silicon Valley; income inequality; working poor; Calgary Stampede; Yukon; Canada; Over 50 Travel; religion; evangelical; Biographies & Memoirs-Historical-United States; Biographies & Memoirs-Memoirs; carnival barker; personal transformation; inspirational; religion & spirituality; personal growth; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Interstate 40; Interstate 80; Interstate 95; Interstate 90; Interstate 95; California Zephyr; New Jersey; Chicago; Illinois; Alaska Highway; Anchorage; Fairbanks; Denali National Park, St. Elias Mountains; hitchhiking coast-to-coast; British Columbia; Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve; Kluane National Park and Reserve; Aurora Borealis; Dawson Creek; St. Paul; Minneapolis; Minnesota; Minnesota State Fair; Tanana Valley State Fair; Alaska State Fair; Bear Claw Festival; Oklahoma City; Oklahoma State Fair; Dallas; Texas; Texas State Fair; Okefenokee Agricultural Fair; Waycross, Georgia; Veracruz, Mexico; Tampa; Gibtown; International Independent Showmen's Association; Strangest Small Town in America; Showtown USA; Outdoor Amusement Business Association; Showmen's League of America; Buffalo Bill Cody; Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook; lepidopterist; Monarch Butterfly migration; oral history; cultural anthropology; Midwest, South, Wyoming; Montana; Mexico City; Chichen Itza; Merida; Veracruz State; Tlapacoyan; Outpost Nurse; sword swallower; fire breather; half-man; bed of nails; Ward Wall; Carnival Warehouse; Carnival Magazine; Modern Midways, Amusements of America, Wade Shows, McDaniel Brother, Classic Amusement, Iowa State Fair, American Dirt
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