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1960s: From small town New Jersey on a road trip with a difference
Dust
What you need to know before your trail
J.J Walsh and Tony ‘El Greco’ Papadakis are inseparable. Smoking Kents out on an abandoned cannery dock, and watching gulls sway on rusting buoys in the sea, they dream of adventure…a time when they can act as adults. The day they’ll see the mighty Pacific Ocean.
Set in small-town New Jersey in the 1960s, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, Dust follows the boys through the dry heat of a formative summer. They face religious piety and its murderous consequences, alcohol, girls, sex, loss, tragedy and ultimately the tiny things that combine to make life what it is for the two friends – a great adventure.
But it’s a road trip through the heart of southern America with J.J.’s father that truly reveals a darker side to life – the two halves of a divided nation, where wealth, poverty and racial bigotry collide
Travel Guide
The road trip with a difference
This is a road trip, a story about life and its complexities – death, sadness, abandonment, illness, heartbreak – but it’s also a road trip with JJ’s father:
It’s a journey through the 1960’s and all the poltical and social changes the county went through at the time. The horror of the Vietnam War, Nixon’s political battles and the political changes that engendered. Then there was the culmination of the first man on the moon and the assassination of JFK, a technological breakthrough and a political bomb.
There are also huge events in the lives of these young boys- The Red Sox almost winning the World Series, the opening of the first Burger King, music from that era including The Rolling Stones – landmarks and memories in the impressionable lives of these young boys as they grow up and experience the world around them.
Then there is the road trip with JJ’s Dad to Savannah, Georgia when the boys are 15 or so. As they journey through the American South, the cities of Charlotte and Savannah come to life and shock and surprise in equal measure. This is a tour of 1960’s America and the zeitgeist of that time in each and every way. Some of the paths they take are filled with racism and political upheaval but it’s a journey you will remember.
Savannah
“Savananah lay before us, lush and elegant, caught in time, preserved by luck and judgement, a great pearl thrown up seventeen miles from the ocean, as though too delicate to be cut and bruised by the sometimes angry sea”
“Savannah was that dream, clinging to her past her history , nailing her colours to her mast”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Dust
Author/Guide: Mark Thompson Destination: New Jersey, South Carolina, Charleston, Savannah Departure Time: 1960s
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