Far-flung Hubbell

Sue Hubbell

Random House, 1995 - Essays - 187 pages

The subjects of the thirteen travel pieces in this book include: where to find the best homemade pies in the United States (including recipes) - something on which the author holds strong convictions ("Never order pie within one mile of an interstate highway"); Elvis Presley "sightings" around the country; the demise of the five-and-dime stores; "bug art" (astonishing tracings of symmetry and beauty made by the movements of bugs); truck stops across the country; the mythology of earthquake predictions; the fifty-third Annual Magic Get-Together in Colon, Michigan, where the author spends a week with one thousand magicians; the National Bowling Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis; a visit to the Florida newsroom of those scandal-flogging tabloids Weekly World News and the National Enquirer; the difficulties of driving in Boston; and canoeing in the Boundary Waters Area between Minnesota and Canada.

What people are saying

FAR FLUNG HUBBELL: Essays from the American Road

User Review  - Kirkus

Absolutely delightful slices of Americana from Hubbell (Broadsides from the Other Orders, 1993, etc.). Known as a crackerjack natural historian, Hubbell here dons a journalist's garb to file these wry ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - NellieMc - LibraryThing

A little disappointing for those of us who really admire her writings about natural history. This is the same travel genre as Bill Bryson or Calvin Trillin--searching out quirky Americana--but she ...

Contents

• The Great American Pie Expedition: 3
• Happy New Year: 31
• Hey Presto: 41

About the author

Sue Hubbell was born Suzanne Gilbert in Kalamazoo, Michigan on January 28, 1935. She received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Southern California in 1956 and a master's degree in library science from Drexel University in 1965. She worked as a librarian at Trenton State College and as a periodicals librarian at Brown University. In 1972, she and her first husband moved to a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and took up beekeeping. To supplement the income from honey sales, she wrote freelance articles for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. After they divorced, she continued to run the large beekeeping operation. She also wrote several books including A Country Year: Living the Questions, A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them, Far-Flung Hubbell: Essays from the American Road, and Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys Into the Time Before Bones. She suffered from dementia and decided to stop eating and drinking on September 9, 2018 because she did not want to eventually be placed under indefinite institutional care. She died on October 13, 2018 at the age of 83.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Far-flung Hubbell
• Author: Sue Hubbell
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Random House, 1995
• ISBN: 067942833X, 9780679428336
• Length: 187 pages