Every now and then, someone falls into our lives from another world, someone whose very presence takes us to higher planes and gives us deeper understandings of realities we barely can see. For me, that person is Neil King Jr, the Pulitzer Prize winning former senior editor at the Wall Street Journal. I was working on my book, Bear Me Into Freedom, as he was working on his, and we developed a friendship based on a variety of similar interests. His book, of course, will sell tens of thousands of copies, but Neil was kind enough to take me along for the ride. I was given the daily journals of his walk from his home on Capitol Hill to Central Park in New York, visited him along the way, offered my thoughts on his initial drafts, and then received copies of all his editor's edits. Aspiring writers would pay huge sums of money for that privilege, a master class in the writing of non-fiction, and I cannot get over my good fortune to have been brought into his circle.

What do people think of his book? How about Ken Burns: “This is a near perfect book, an exquisitely seen and felt memoir of an American journey; it’s not just a geographic journey, full of keen observations and thoughtful insights, but a spiritual one, finding in our complex and sometimes contradictory landscape a mirror in which King’s own inner life awakens as he wanders. Amazing.” Not sure how many people care about my take on amazing, but here is my review of American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal, in The Talbot Spy.