Author Talk - "Two Hundred Miles from Baghdad: Cultures, Conflicts and the Lost Art of Hitchhiking" with Louis Salome

York Public Library welcomes Louis Salome, author of Two Hundred Miles from Baghdad: Conflicts, Cultures, and the Lost Art of Hitchhiking. He will be sharing excerpts from his book, as he shares his remarkable stories about journalism, hitchhiking and authoring books. 

About the Book

By planes, trains, and automobiles, journalist Lou Salome has hitched his way through some of the most interesting - and volatile - places on Earth.

In September 1958, Salome hurried past Barne McNeil's blacksmith shop to the town's blinking traffic light and began hitchhiking to college. He was seventeen. Decades later his hitching experience led Salome through deserts and hostile zones in Asia, Europe and Africa. At the end of his internationalist life, he thumbed in the New Hampshire woods to gauge how times had changed. This is his story of the adventures, risks and the fun he embraced while engaging in a lost art.

Told with conversational flair and modesty, Lou Salome’s travelogue presents a humanist’s view of a world in flux. With each new ride hitched, a new friend is made. This is a book for anyone with curiosity about our changing world, and nostalgia for a time when people and cultures interacted in a more thoughtful, deliberate way.

About the Author

Louis Salome was a newspaper reporter and editor for thirty-five years. He reported on national political conventions, corruption in politics, government and big business, and was an award-winning editorial writer. He has been an author since 2010. Salome has written three books, the latest about his hitching experiences and the lost art of hitchhiking, and the social and economic changes that doomed the art.

He was twice given the Distinguished Service Award by Sigma Delta Chi, the National Society of Professional Journalists. He was the Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent and the London-based European correspondent for Cox Newspapers from 1989 to 1998.

A New Englander by birth, Lou Salome holds a bachelor's degree from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts where he was a classmate of Dr. Anthony Fauci's. He also has a Master's Degree in American History from Boston College, and a Ph.D in hitchhiking and news reporting on four continents.

Mr. Lou, as he was known in foreign climes, hitched to college for two years in the late fifties, hitched into and out of battle zones in Asia, Africa and Europe in the nineties, and hitched for fun, but with little success, in the New Hampshire woods in 2004 while writing books.

As the editorial page editor of The Miami (FL) News, Lou Salome won numerous journalism prizes. In 1981 and in 1984, he won the national Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Editorial Writing. In 1984, he won the Jamaica Daily Gleamer Editorial Writing Award given by the Inter-American Press Association, In 1987, he won the first annual Thomas Jefferson First Amendment Award given by the Cultural Action Network.

Lou Salome is listed in the latest edition of Who's Who In America.

He lives with his wife, Patricia, on Dover Point Road, across from Tendercrop Farm, the finest local grocery in the nation.