America Was Hard to Find audiobook

This book! Oh my goodness. I will never understand why it did not get the publicity and marketing support it deserved. I will go back and read this author’s first and second books – her writing is that spectacular!About the book… How timely was this novel? It was published on May 14, and the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission was July 20, 1969 – 50 years ago. One of the main characters is a fictitious NASA astronaut who took the first step on the moon. So, there’s that bit of timeliness. But also, this book does an incredible job of capturing a nation’s unrest during a period of political uncertainty (during the Vietnam War, which coincided with the Space Race). There are plenty of interesting parallels that can be drawn between today’s America, with its air of uncertainty, its young people who feel lost and adrift and rebellious. And, yes, the novel has a young, defiant character whose life is connected to the astronaut’s. The third main character is her son, caught in the fray of his mother’s actions. Even if you don’t consider yourself highly politically charged, this is worth a read. Because, at its heart, it is a book about people and relationships and the decisions we make as humans.With a dense, rich style of literary writing that delivers the reader right into the hearts and minds of the characters, you will feel a part of their worlds. This is character-driven literary fiction at its best.I like books that make me think. And this incredibly intelligent book did just that. This is a novel about outsiders finding their place in the world, in their country. And in large part, I felt the story begged a larger question: where do we draw the line between personality quirks and mental health disorders?I read this on my iPad and have made several of the passages viewable, but also wanted to include a few samples of the delicious language in this book; metaphors and rich sensory descriptions abound:This was the real misfortune of the people on earth, he thought: they had made their lives somewhere they had never really seen.Gasping and coughing is a barbed pleasure, the idea his body might get rid of anything. Wouldn’t it be good to eliminate an organ, any of them, survive on less, be made of less.Her way with people, drawing them out, was like those magician’s scarves, silky and effortless and a little bit evil.As he turned to go she caught him leaving, and she threw him a look as though he were a chore too long postponed, some filth that had spread and changed.His temperature had ranged about wildly, near shiver to near fever. In his rearview Wright ran a comb through his hair, an act so unfamiliar to him that he thought he looked like a cartoon doing it, a dog trying to pass as human. He walked the parking lot of the strip mall with the sort of panic that is quick and bright, all silvery angles of movement.If you enjoy literary historical fiction, open-ended finishes, deeply drawn and flawed characters, this book will send you over the moon .

This was a very different novel. I really don’t know how to even begin to review it, except to say that the writing was beautiful and I came away from reading this with an extreme sense of sadness about our country. Maybe it’s just the state of America right now and my personal view of it.

I love a good sprawling novel, one that swings for the fences -- perhaps even more so when it doesn't quite get there. There's something to be said for ambition, especially when so much of the book is so wonderful, and Alcott really makes it into orbit several times with this one. The first section is superb, all dry-heat and summer sun, the thrill of scientific progress mixed with the thrill of sex. And just about any time Vincent ends up back on the page, later in the novel, I was transfixed. Fay and Wright, however, are more fitful characters and their fitfulness feels intentional, but just doesn't always feel as vivid. Put another way, nothing about the middle of the book is bad; it just doesn't do what the first third did for me. The ending, however -- the last dozen or so pages -- are a tremendously daring feat and one that had me gripping the cover of the book and drilling my eyes into the words again and again to catch a glimpse of... well, of what happened. This is a great summer read, warts and all.

A bartender and an Air Force test pilot have a brief and intense affair and then go their separate ways. He goes on to be an astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon. She becomes one of the most wanted radical, a part of a group that sets off homemade bombs to protest the war in Vietnam. This is an amazing novel of alternate history. The story and characters are so rich and intriguing. This is the third novel I’ve read by this author and each one is slightly better than the one before. This is a big book that you will think about for a long time after reading it.

What drives people to achieve greatness or infamy? In America Was Hard to Find, Kathleen Alcott tells the story of a brief love affair and the child who resulted. It beings in the late Fifties where Vincent Kahn, a married jet pilot marking time while hoping to join the space program has an affair with a young woman named Fay Wren. Fay does not tell him she is pregnant, aware of the harm they have done Vincent’s wife and, perhaps, realizing how unworthy he is. Strangely both of them will become famous, one for walking on the moon and the other for political terrorism.The story is told in three parts. First the love story, then the story of Vincent and Fay achieving the fame and infamy that seem fated. Fay raises their child Wright in precarity, with the future uncertain, often on the run and underground. Vincent achieves his goal, but seems to be emptied out, an empty man.Wright grows up longing for normalcy. One of his big rebellions against his mom is going to a public school for a day. He gets that normalcy when he goes to live with his grandparents, but it’s not all he hoped for. No one has ever told him who his father is, but time and again, people tell him he looks like the famous astronaut, the first man who walked on the moon. He suspects they may be on to something He seems alienated from himself, even as he begins his own self-discovery in the San Francisco of the Eighties.I liked America Was Hard to Find a lot even though it left me with so many questions. I cared about Fay and Wright and even Vincent. I wondered how differently their lives would have progressed if they had been honest about their emotions. That is what I want from a book, the questions and sometimes the anger about how a character behaves. I was angry with Vincent, Fay, and even Wright.Alcott does a great job of setting the stage in terms of the history and the social milieu. She based Shelter on Weather Underground and did a lot of research and interviews with astronauts to get an authentic sense of who Vincent would be. The main characters seem emotionally broken and I wonder if that is the point, that they cannot be so obsessed with their causes if they were not broken.America Was Hard to Find will be released on May 14th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through Edelweiss.America Was Hard to Find at Ecco Books | Harper CollinsKathleen Alcott author site★★★★https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...

Rare to see a book reach so audaciously for the epic while maintaining its toeholds in the crevices of details with nary a misstep. One of the year's best for me without a doubt.

I wish I could give this more stars. It is incredible. Every sentence.

i ended up LOVING parts of this -- the writing was so lush that I just felt drawn in and didn't want to stop. it's an ambitious novel and i think parts of it don't quite work because the text is so withholding about its characters. in particular i think the pieces about write and fay's time in the us part of the revolutionary group feel a little flat, whereas vincent, despite being a more distant character, feels more realized. it took me over a month to read the first fifty pages and once i moved past that, i was fully immersed and finished the rest in a weekend (also it was overdue and the library is harassing me).

Very nice treatment of three eventful American decades. Think of some American writers of the 1960s to ‘80s—Didion, Mailer, Wolfe, DeLillo—and more recent ones—Rachel Kushner, Nathan Hill, Rebecca Makkai, and most lately Salvatore Scibona—and their topics—1960s California, the space program, Vietnam, the counterculture, the violent radical left, AIDS—and here’s a work to join them. Imagine a plot involving a fictional first astronaut to walk on the moon, a fictional rebellious heiress, and their misbegotten son and his decades-long story that shows America to indeed be hard to find, capturing the feel of those years and specific events in a paced but lively narrative that moves and some wonderful writing along the way—often stunning in its descriptions, attention to detail, metaphors, and insights into the characters set against the background dramas of the times.

The last third of the book lost me a bit, but overall this was ambitious and interesting.

I received a free Uncorrected Proof copy of this book from the Goodreads Giveaways program and am thankful to anyone who made that possible.This novel follows the lives of two very different people who briefly intersect and the child that springs from this intersection and explores how people are shaped by their pasts and where/what they came from. The writing style took me some time to warm up to but once I fell into it, I was all in.My only complaint was the ambiguity in (view spoiler)[ the wrapping up of Wright's story. Myriad rumors abound, but you never really find out what happens to him. (hide spoiler)] This may have been fitting but I was disappointed because I was highly invested in him as a character.I found this to be extremely moving, engrossing and informative and I would highly recommend it to anyone with any interest in the 1960's, political activism/radicalism, the space program, or the AIDS crisis of the 1980's.

This novel was gut wrenching, heart breaking whilst maintaining a powerful account of American history, Alcott is ambitious and intentional around her characters. I felt bound to the experience of Fay and her son, the development of these characters was unpredictable and turbulent. Could not recommend this enough!

Title: America Was Hard to FindAuthor: Kathleen AlcottAge Group: AdultGenre: Historical FictionSeries: StandaloneStar Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars I received a copy of this book in a First Reads contest giveaway—my thanks to Goodreads and Ecco Publishers! I won this book as a prize in a First Reads giveaway, and I’ve been winning so many books recently that I’m trying to coordinate them by the month so as to line them up close to their actual publication dates. America Was Hard to Find was the first book in that stack that I could find that was published in May, so I decided to read it before I went back to my library stack. I just finished this book this morning, and I don’t know how I feel about it, honestly. Sad, thought-provoking, strange and visceral, this reimagining of The Cold War era was a strange story that I will never forget. It revolves around Fay Fern, a bartender turned radical, Vincent Kahn, an astronaut that is about to take America’s first steps on the moon, and the son that results from their forbidden union, Wright. Spanning decades and generations, this book was odd, brutal, strangely tender and thought-provoking. It’s hard to get my feelings on paper, because they’re all tangled up. This book was heartbreaking, tender, sad and blatantly political. Fay Fern is the daughter of affluent, wealthy parents, and both she and her sister, Charlie, have spurned their family’s wealth and constrained way of living. The girls’ only friend is a mean, drunk horse named Lloyd. Faye spends her days bartending and reading books. But the monotony of her life is broken by the arrival of a married astronaut, Vincent Kahn. They two begin a secret, forbidden affair, and nine months later, Fay’s son, Wright, is born. This book documents how Fay and Vincent attract one another, and Wright’s coming of age in the wake of his mother becoming a radical domestic terrorist. As I said, I’m not really sure how this book made me feel. It was vivid and well-written, but there were a lot of words that I wasn’t familiar with, and the pacing was kind of all over the place. But the characters were well-drawn and sympathetic: I liked how Fay and Charlie turned their backs on their controlling, constraining family boundaries, and I also enjoyed Wright as he grew up with his strange, radicalized mother. I liked the ending, and the other characters, but I really didn’t like Vincent. He just seemed thin and emotionless, and the book was bittersweet. Searing, eye-opening, and more than a little strange, America Was Hard to Find was a good book, even though it wasn’t normally one I would pick up. The bottom line: Political, bittersweet, tender and strange, I really enjoyed America Was Hard to Find. Next on deck: Grim Lovelies by Megan Shepherd!https://literatureobsessed.blogspot.c...

I'm reminded of the 1970 protests over the war in VietNam when I began college at UW a week after the Sterling Hall bombing, a true education for a naïve farm girl. But, Fay's leap from the comfort of a wealthy family steeped in good manners & traditions into volunteer work for an NGO in Ecuador of all places is just too bizarre. But, her time spent as a barkeep at her sister's "inn" in the dessert near an air base, where she got pregnant by a married pilot is equally bizarre. But, we know that people live their lives in step with a far different drummer.Fay goes home to live with the parents & has a baby boy. They live with the grands until the boy is about 5 before she flees to Ecuador. Her "missionary" work ends when she meets Randy, a veteran of the Viet Nam war who is an expat living in Ecuador. [How did he get there?] When the American astronauts come to Quito, there is a protest, which seems to mark the beginning of Fay & Randy's life together. The boy, Wright, seems to be an accessory to the mom to enhance her natural beauty. They return to the US and become part of "Shelter"[analogous to the Weathermen a/k/a Weather Underground.] Fay & Randy each become well-known for their bomb-making skills, until Fay makes a mistake that results in the death of 2 of their friends. When her face shows up on WANTED posters, they must flee & hide, hoping no one recognizes her. Fay's death, likely suicide, was spectacular in that she was protesting at a NASA launch & burned to death in the missile's ignition flames, while Wright was captured in a photo, running away with the matches. As Wright becomes a teen, he also feels a need to flee & hide as people often look at him with a sense of recognition.....because he happens to look just like the biological father he has never met. Living with the grandparents is like suffocating. He basically was home-schooled by Fay so he does incredibly well in some classes at school while he is years behind in other classes. His sudden realization that he's gay didn't add much to this tale, IMO. He walked away from his good men friends in San Francisco as easily as he walked away from any girl, his grandparents, and his mother's people. The author is talking about my generation. I never felt outrage at NASA for the cost of sending a man to the moon while our country waged war in Southeast Asia, so I don't understand that element of this fictionalized account of America's history. Wright's long letters to Vincent Kahn were so beautiful & eloquent..... that was my favorite part of this book, so I went back & re-read those. Wright's letters gave us the best description of what his life was like, what he was thinking & dreaming about. If this story is a true account of one of our famous astronauts, it offers a sordid side of how those cowboys at NASA behaved, with too much testosterone!, during a very tumultuous time in our history.

Vincent e Fay. I protagonisti di “È difficile trovare l’America” non vi faranno sconti. Non trattano bene il lettore, il più delle volte sono schivi, chiusi, ma ogni volta che aprono un piccolo spiraglio è una vera e propria boccata di ossigeno."Aveva quattordici anni meno di lui. Le esperienze passavano sopra le donne così giovani, pensava. Qualunque cosa fosse accaduta fra loro, lei poteva sopportarlo. Lui sarebbe stato un lampo, una cosa minima, come un vestito indossato una volta e ricordato a stento. Un colore, una forma. Non comprometteva niente, pensava. La vita di Fay restava aperta".Fay e Vincent. Due mondi distanti, due modi di vivere lontani. Lo specchio di ciò in cui l’America credeva, lo spirito di ribellione e l’accettazione senza mai alzare la testa."La loro non era un’infatuazione per quello che facevano insieme, ma uno stupore per le loro differenze, per tutta la strada che dovevano fare solo per raggiungere il pensiero dell’altro".Un’astronauta e una cameriera che finirà per diventare il volto del movimento contro la guerra del Vietnam. Un uomo rigido, inquadrato, composto, “spigoloso”; una ragazza che ha detto di no ai soldi dei genitori per poter credere di essere libera.La straordinarietà di questo romanzo sta tutta nello stile della Alcott. La sua scrittura procede per dettagli. Si va avanti guardando il modo in cui Vincent rigira un frutto tra le mani, o le caviglie di Fay.Sguardi precisi e attenti che portano, un attimo dopo, una riflessione profonda, che si estende, che va oltre, che si comprende attraverso qualcosa che potrebbe sembrare banale ma che invece l’autrice riesce a comlmare di senso.Nello sfondo, un’America vera nella sua divisione più profonda, rituali distanti, copertine di “Life”, gesti di violenza per difendere la pace. Uno spaccato di Storia descritto nel modo più autentico, senza necessità di sottolineare le differenze perché affiorano da sole.La recensione completa sul blog: https://www.silenziostoleggendo.com/2...

NotSummerAnymore Book Report AMERICA WAS HARD TO FINDBy Kathleen Alcott Another great book.Thick story. Each sentence feels like its own poem. Sometimes I had to read them twice. Historical backdrop: Late 1950s-1980s in America. The Vietnam War and its protests. Space Race, including the early Apollo missions. The onset of AIDS. Alcott took true events and fictionalized them. The fire in the command module of Apollo 1 killed 1 fictional astronaut instead of 3. Vincent Kahn was the first man to walk on the moon instead of Neil Armstrong. An organization called "Shelter" bombed American buildings in protest of the Vietnam War instead of the Weather Underground. At any rate, the storyline... Imagine a wild but keenly intelligent 19yo girl named Fay Fern who eschews her parents wealth and moves to her troubled older sister's bar in the desert near the Edwards Airforce Base. Imagine she meets and has an affair with married air force pilot, Vincent Kahn, who has dreams of becoming an astronaut. Then the affair is over, but imagine there is a baby boy named Wright. In an arc of events, Fay becomes increasingly radicalized against the Vietnam War and the money the US spends on the space missions. Wright is raised in the tumult of her participation in the Shelter organization. At the same time Vincent fulfills his dream to become an astronaut. But he comes back from the moon detached and isolated. Anyway, some big and dramatic things happen, and I don't want to spoil them. This novel was a good thinker. Somewhere in here was a single line that seemed key: "We lose our think at the boundaries." The writing is rich and nuanced. Best to stay present for it. #bookreport

Yes, this novel is a page-turner but much more: The details and language are remarkable, hitting you with every sense, from the smells of kerosene and rosewater, to the tufts of stuffing peeking out from a torn winter parka. Near an Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert in 1959, strong, silent, sexy pilot Vincent Kahn and rich girl-turned-vague rebel Fay Fern have a brief affair. Then Vincent goes on to become the first man to walk on the moon, while Fay abandons her family, lives in Ecuador for a while working at a small inn, and then returns to the U.S. as part of a radical cell that bombs military offices and courthouses to protest the Vietnam War.Oh, and Fay never tells Vincent that they have a son, Wright.Probably the most fascinating sections are those about Vincent's training as an astronaut. Indeed, my main complaint is that "America Was Hard To Find" runs too long, yet skimps too much on Vincent's unusual experiences. (Perhaps I'm jaded: This is the third novel I've reviewed in five months about '60s radicals on the run; the third will be out in August, so look for my review of "We Are All Good People Here." For my part, at least my next novel "The Stories We Tell" will feature less dramatic '60s protestors!)While the how-will-they-intersect structure is overused, the action never flags and the descriptions always catch you short.

I admired then questioned then acknowledged Kathleen Alcott's writing in this book. I came to realize, cycling through my responses as I read, that her thoughts are deeper than mine and more complete. She takes time and gives attention to all shapes on a body, in a question, of a held view. She comes wit or to an opinion and is not shy to express it, but her basis is both personal (emotional) and philo/political (intellectual). Where I could end up blustering for lack of retention of what I learned or lack of depth when I delved, she would have a knife edge sharp answer/reason/purpose. I am humbled by Kathleen Alcott and by my diminishingly (I hope) ignorant opinion, forming as I progressed through this novel.She makes me think sometimes to move beyond my held opinion and sometimes to solidify the elements of my held opinion.And to think, I have lived through all the matters raised here....