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| Greyhound Diary | 
 enlarge | Author: James Inman
Publisher: Lulu.com
Category: Book
Buy New: $9.86
Avg. Customer Rating:  (8 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1094417
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Pages: 79
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.2
ISBN: 1411649222
EAN: 9781411649224
ASIN: 1411649222
Publication Date: May 17, 2006
Release Date: May 17, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The Greyhound Diary Travel Guide is a depressingly hilarious roaming narrative. A postmodern Odyssey from the backwoods of Wheatland to the lost highway in West Memphis. From the trashed streets of Newark to the industrial cesspool that is Cleveland. Trapped inside the Turtle Boat with tattooed clowns and freak-show white trash, a grueling masochistic non-stop journey into the heart of fear. Everyone, regardless of age, race, color, creed, sexual orientation, class distinction and/or drug and alcohol dependency will relate to this universal saga steeped in American popular culture. This horrid tour is a cynical account of what it feels like to be out there on the bus in the middle of nowhere crawling around at ten miles an hour with Amelia Earhart's retarded brother at the controls. This is everything you've forgotten on those trips home from college. A fascinating, compelling ride!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Your pretensions will fit underneath May 6, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Any national discussion of elitism should begin and end with one question: "At any point since you reached the age of majority, have you had the occasion to travel by Greyhound Bus Service?" If the answer is affirmative, no further discussion is required.
James Inman`s journal of one such trip is laugh aloud funny and wipe your eyes depressing often within the span of a single page. I've had this experience and due to a confluence of circumstance not all that long ago. You can't help but to smile as you recall each and every idiosyncratic person he mentions and cringe at the disparity of many others. The complete text is less than 70 pages so it's pretty likely that you will even think of a couple of other examples he was fortunate enough to have avoided during his journey.
Then it dawns on you...I was on that bus..I'm normal guy.
Alcohol would make a nice companion piece. May 22, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Thank all that is evil that James Inman got on the wrong bus. If he hadn't, then we wouldn't have his 'Greyhound Diary'. My own experiences on the bus have been quite pleasant -- in sharp contrast to Inman's -- but I also have no story to tell (and it's only a coincidence, James, that I'm writing this while traveling on the bus).
To its credit, Inman's story is a fairly quick read. If it weren't, you'd wonder how he lived to tell the tale or why you were still reading it.
Inman's lists, his rants, his smoldering, smelly details all add up to a laugh-out-loud read no matter where or when you read them, though alcohol would make a nice companion piece.
'Greyhound Diary' is 'On the Road' for the homeless, 'Oh, The Places You'll Go' for the chronically mentally ill, and 'The Grapes of Wrath' for people who would never read that book in the first place. It's a sweet, sloppy slice of America's yawning underbelly.
James Inman isn't a genius, but his work is.
 The blue water words of an American Treasure May 13, 2007
James Inman is an American Treasure.
No one else yet has been able to capture the world of Greyhound the way that James Inman has.
If you have ever ridden on a Greyhound bus, this book is for you.
I'll say it again, James Inman is an American Treasure.
Okay,
Father Luke
Night ... at the Grey Cafe ... March 29, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Having just finished reading this book, I had to leave a positive review after having laughed myself silly for the last two nights. At a mere 79 pages, Inman's travel diary reads like a polished novella of the caliber of Paul Bowles.
James Inman touches on a subject that many people have dealt with but few people have written about - without sounding like an ad brochure or meaningless moan from Lake Wobegon. This is a great literary tour through an unlisted United States.
I gave this book four stars instead of five, because I could've read for another hundred pages or so.
James Inman is a very funny guy... March 12, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I say that James Inman is very funny guy, I'm not just offering a clinical diagnosis. During my long and checkered apprenticeship as writer, I worked for several years as mental health therapist. I also wrote a humor column for The Kansas City Business Journal. So when I tell you that Inman's "Greyhound Diary" is very, very funny, I mean: it made me laugh. Explosively, unpredictably and often. As Miguel de Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE demonstrated in the 17th century, cruelty is often at the heart of humor. Knowing James as I do, I can say with confidence: he has considerable talent as a cruel and very funny observer of the human farce.
The particular beauty of "Greyhound Diary" and its author's gifts lies in James Inman's acerbity and sense of immediacy. Inman's terrain is that nether zone of paranoid malaise, conspiracy theories and sociopathic cabals littering an American landscape that has come to be increasingly "informed" by Reality TV, infomercials, videogame addiction, proliferating meth labs, squalid hype and vicious lobbying, the ubiquitous suspicions of a culture that is lost in some Cronenberg-esque, electronic wilderness on bad acid, a culture deranged and raging with denial. A civilization positively frothing at the gills. "Greyhound Diary" takes the pulse of America and is dialing 911.
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