Man and Horse

The Long Ride Across America

A memoir of one man’s 4,000-mile journey across America in 1974 with his horse named Gizmo, a story of adventure, endurance, self-discovery, and the healing power of companionship, recently rediscovered by Greta Gerwig's megahit Barbie.

“Man & Horse is one of those rare and splendid books that stay with you long after you finish the last page.” — Bill Bryson, author of A Walk in the Woods

"This rough-hewn yet elegant, one-of-a-kind memoir will make you want to throw a few choice belongings in a bag and set out to explore. I would follow John and Gizmo anywhere." — Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of American Rambler

I was always a curious man. Gizmo was always a curious horse. We were brothers.

In the spring of 1974, twenty-four-year-old John Egenes set out from Ventura, California with a hundred dollars in his pocket, a beat-up cavalry saddle, and a dream of crossing the country that he’d been harbouring since his boyhood in a broken home. On Gizmo, a young horse that he’d raised himself, he headed east.

Over the next seven months, man and horse travelled through eleven states, trekking across America’s deserts, mountains, and prairies. They passed through cities and small towns, using worn US Geological Survey maps and dead reckoning to find their way. They slept in graveyards and abandoned shacks, drank water from cattle tanks, and shared what little food they had (including the occasional Snickers bar for Gizmo). They endured lightning storms in the Southwestern deserts and snow in the mountains of the east.

John and Gizmo travelled across an America that no longer exists, and in this raw and humorous account of that journey — part travelogue, part spiritual quest — Egenes reckons with the widening chasm between the analogue America of the 1970s and the reality of hyperdrive in which we live now, reminding us of what’s truly worth holding onto.

Man & Horse is the rare kind of memoir, authentic and quietly profound, and it captures our world from a view like no other: as seen between a horse’s ears.

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