Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard is an adventure memoir, a time capsule, and an unfiltered look at the joys, risks, and revelations of a cross-country road trip—then and now.
Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard is an adventure memoir, a time capsule, and an unfiltered look at the joys, risks, and revelations of a cross-country road trip—then and now.
In 1980, Graham Broyd did something outrageous—he sold his scholarship ticket to Washington, DC, bought a one-way flight to Los Angeles, and set off to hitchhike across America. Armed with a red backpack, a surfboard, and a knack for finding himself in both incredible and ridiculous situations, he bummed rides, crashed on beaches, and stumbled into experiences that would shape him forever. From rolling the dice in Vegas to interviewing senators in Congress, from the open roads of the West to the neon chaos of New York City, every mile brought a new story.
Forty years later, Graham returns to retrace his steps, revisiting the landscapes, people, and memories that defined his youth. What has changed? What remains? And how does time shift our understanding of the roads we once traveled?
Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard is a raw and humorous adventure memoir, a time capsule of 1980s America, and an unfiltered reflection on risk, nostalgia, and the unexpected turns that shape a life. It’s for anyone who has ever dreamed of throwing away the map, saying yes to the unknown, or looking back at a wild decision and thinking, “I’d do it all over again.”
For fans of Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, and anyone who knows that the best stories come from the roads we didn’t plan to take.
Details
Price: $22.99
Pages: 304
Publisher: Advantage Media Group, Inc.
Imprint: Advantage Media Group
Publication Date: 12th August 2025
Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
ISBN: 9798891882317
Format: Paperback
BISACs: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues TRAVEL / Food, Lodging & Transportation / Road Travel HUMOR / Form / Essays HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
Author Bio
GRAHAM BROYD is a British-American businessman, writer, and athlete. Born in Dorking, England, he went to school in Bedford and then Liverpool, before taking two gap years working and hitchhiking around Europe. In 1978, he went to Birmingham University to study International Relations.
After graduation, Graham started a career in international banking, with his primary purposes being to travel and earn some money—in that order of priority. His first assignments were to New York and the Republic of Panama. Graham spent almost forty years in banking, his time mostly split between New York and London, before retiring in 2024. He was a CEO of the North American businesses of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Mr. Fix-It when the bank encountered existential problems after the global financial crisis in 2008. Graham published his first book, The Panama Canal Treaties: The diplomacy and economics behind the treaty that changed the international order , in 2024.
After his retirement, Graham found his writing voice. A lifetime storyteller, Graham wanted to write down the twenty hitchhiking stories he had told for more than forty years from his original trip to America in 1980. On hearing the stories, friends had always encouraged him to write his story. And so he did.
In 1980, Graham Broyd did something outrageous—he sold his scholarship ticket to Washington, DC, bought a one-way flight to Los Angeles, and set off to hitchhike across America. Armed with a red backpack, a surfboard, and a knack for finding himself in both incredible and ridiculous situations, he bummed rides, crashed on beaches, and stumbled into experiences that would shape him forever. From rolling the dice in Vegas to interviewing senators in Congress, from the open roads of the West to the neon chaos of New York City, every mile brought a new story.
Forty years later, Graham returns to retrace his steps, revisiting the landscapes, people, and memories that defined his youth. What has changed? What remains? And how does time shift our understanding of the roads we once traveled?
Backpack, Jacket, Surfboard is a raw and humorous adventure memoir, a time capsule of 1980s America, and an unfiltered reflection on risk, nostalgia, and the unexpected turns that shape a life. It’s for anyone who has ever dreamed of throwing away the map, saying yes to the unknown, or looking back at a wild decision and thinking, “I’d do it all over again.”
For fans of Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, and anyone who knows that the best stories come from the roads we didn’t plan to take.
Price: $22.99
Pages: 304
Publisher: Advantage Media Group, Inc.
Imprint: Advantage Media Group
Publication Date: 12th August 2025
Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
ISBN: 9798891882317
Format: Paperback
BISACs: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues TRAVEL / Food, Lodging & Transportation / Road Travel HUMOR / Form / Essays HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
GRAHAM BROYD is a British-American businessman, writer, and athlete. Born in Dorking, England, he went to school in Bedford and then Liverpool, before taking two gap years working and hitchhiking around Europe. In 1978, he went to Birmingham University to study International Relations.
After graduation, Graham started a career in international banking, with his primary purposes being to travel and earn some money—in that order of priority. His first assignments were to New York and the Republic of Panama. Graham spent almost forty years in banking, his time mostly split between New York and London, before retiring in 2024. He was a CEO of the North American businesses of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Mr. Fix-It when the bank encountered existential problems after the global financial crisis in 2008. Graham published his first book, The Panama Canal Treaties: The diplomacy and economics behind the treaty that changed the international order , in 2024.
After his retirement, Graham found his writing voice. A lifetime storyteller, Graham wanted to write down the twenty hitchhiking stories he had told for more than forty years from his original trip to America in 1980. On hearing the stories, friends had always encouraged him to write his story. And so he did.
Esther Farmer, Rosalind Petchesky, Sarah Sills, eds.
A Land With a People
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A collection of personal stories, history, poetry, and art A Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic Palestinian legal scholar and activist, Noura Erakat, this book began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area.
Stories touch hearts, open minds, and transform our understanding of the “other”—as well as our comprehension of own roles and responsibilities— and A Land With a People emerges from this reckoning. It brings us the narratives of secular, Muslim, Christian, and queer Palestinians who endure the particular brand of settler colonialism known as Zionism. It relays the transformational journeys of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, queer, and Palestinian Jews who have come to reject the received Zionist narrative. Unflinching in their confrontation of the power dynamics that underlie their transformation process, these writers find the courage to face what has happened to historic Palestine, and to their own families as a result. Contextualized by a detailed historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future—one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be.
Dorothy Lazard
What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World
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From one of California’s most celebrated librarians and public historians, a coming-of-age memoir about the thirst for knowledge and hometown pride.
A Best Book of the Year, Oakland Public Library
2023 Bronze Winner for the Foreword INDIES Award, Autobiography & Memoir
"What You Don’t Know will inspire for its grace, zest and courage." —Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle
Dorothy Lazard grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge. Here in her first book, she vividly tells the story of her journey to becoming “queen of my own nerdy domain.” Today Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian, and in these pages she connects her early intellectual pursuits—including a formative encounter with Alex Haley—to the career that made her a community pillar. As she traces her trajectory to adulthood, she also explores her personal experiences connected to the Summer of Love, the murder of Emmett Till, the flourishing of the Black Arts Movement, and the redevelopment of Oakland. As she writes with honesty about the tragedies she faced in her youth—including the loss of both parents—Lazard’s memoir remains triumphant, animated by curiosity, careful reflection, and deep enthusiasm for life.
Simmons Buntin
Satellite
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How do we find a way to exist equitably in the world without exhausting our natural and cultural resources? Exploring how to create belonging, among both human and nonhuman animals, is our essential work. Parents have the added responsibility of conveying this charge to their children in a way that centers hope and empowerment over guilt and fear.
In Satellite, Simmons Buntin delves into the idea of belonging—in place, time, family, and community—in sixteen essays written over nearly two decades. The pieces range throughout the desert Southwest, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and as far afield as Mount Saint Helens, eastern Montana, northern Vermont, Sweden, and even the moon (if a telescope atop Kitt Peak counts). Buntin examines the beauty and challenges of raising a family and creating more sustainable communities in the Sonoran Desert—and, more broadly, in any of America’s diverse cultural and ecological landscapes. How should community be defined? How do we protect heritage in an age of globalization? How do we find renewal following personal and place-based trauma? What forms may grace take, and how can parents pass that dignity on to their children?
Fortunately, it is a responsibility both shared and rewarding, funny and phenomenal, for at every turn there is a new discovery, a new insight, a new integration between ourselves and the world that culminates, when we succeed, in a vibrant sense of place. Buntin searches for a balance between the built and natural environments and the beings that inhabit them in a way that enables us not only to survive but to thrive together.
Robert Shetterly
Portraits of Earth Justice
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Five compelling essays and fifty stunning portraits and profiles of American environmental activists
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly's magnificent color portraits and profiles of fifty environmental and climate activists—people who diagnose the truth of the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted and take action. The book also features original essays by revered environmentalists Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Bill Bigelow, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose words illuminate the plight and its causes, and point a way forward.
Along with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery, the third tragic and persistent mistake of the leaders of this country was to attempt to separate economic and political culture from the laws of nature—to operate on the basis that nature could be exploited endlessly for profit. The damage done to the Earth and to the future of life on the planet is incalculable. The people portrayed here have bought warnings, offered solutions, and organized movements to restore ecological sanity.
Klaus Vieweg
Hegel
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A monumental new biography of a pivotal yet poorly understood pioneer in modern philosophy.
When a painter once told Goethe that he wanted to paint the most celebrated man of the age, Goethe directed him to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel worked from the credo: To philosophize is to learn to live freely. While he was slow and cautious in the development of his philosophy, his intellectual growth was like an odyssey of the mind, and, contrary to popular belief, his life was full of twists and turns, suspense and even danger.
In this landmark biography, the philosopher Klaus Vieweg paints a new picture of the life and work of the most important representative of German idealism. His vivid portrait provides readers an intimate account of Hegel's times and the milieu in which he developed his thought, along with detailed, clear-sighted analyses of Hegel's four major works. What results is a new interpretation of Hegel through the lens of reason and freedom.
Vieweg draws on extensive archival research that has brought to light a wealth of hitherto undiscovered documents and handwritten notes relating to Hegel's work, touching on Hegel's engagement with the leading thinkers and writers of his age: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others. Combatting clichés and misunderstandings about Hegel, Vieweg also offers a sustained defense of the philosopher's more progressive impulses. Highly praised upon its release in Germany as having set the new biographical standard, this monumental work emphasizes Hegel's relevance for today, depicting him as a vital figure in the history of philosophy.
Deborah Miranda
Bad Indians (Expanded Edition)
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Now in paperback and newly expanded, this gripping memoir is hailed as essential by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and ELLE magazine—among others.
Bad Indians—part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir—is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Widely adopted in classrooms and book clubs throughout the United States, Bad Indians—now reissued in significantly expanded form—plumbs ancestry, survivance, and the cultural memory of Native California.
In this best-selling, now-classic memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family and the experiences of California Indians more widely through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. This expanded edition includes several new poems and essays, as well as an extensive afterword, totaling more than fifty pages of new material. Wise, indignant, and playful all at once, Bad Indians is a beautiful and devastating read, and an indispensable book for anyone seeking a more just and accurate telling of American history.