Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir About Men and Motorcycles

At 57, with heart disease and a bad case of wanderlust, Gary Paulsen decided to get himself the motorcycle of his dreams and take it to Alaska from his home in New Mexico. "The bike held me like a hand, caught me and took me with it so that the engine seemed to be my engine, the wheels my wheels," he writes. "It was singular, visceral, unlike any other motorcycle I had ever ridden. In some way it brought me out of myself, out ahead of myself, into myself, into the core of what I was, what I needed to live. And I knew, my core knew that I would never be the same again, could never be the same."

Paulsen writes in a blaze of macho invective, about men who like drinkin' and butcherin' and guns and "poker with no-limits stakes, or stakes high enough to make you intensely focus on everything there is--and there is everything--in the game." But when he's writing about the spicy characters he's encountered in his wide-ranging travels around America, this short memoir, for all its exaggerated manliness, turns out to be quite funny. --Maria Dolan