Overview

The real traveling carnival is in the pathos of carnival lives behind the scenes. American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or neighborhood festival the same way again! Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working shoulder-to-shoulder with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last King of the Sideshows. An insult dunk tank clown is shot. Masked gunmen rob his carnival. And a young showman friend dies on the road. It's a new classic American road story as he hitchhikes to shows in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, and Florida where he works in a freak show. He becomes the #1 hitchhiker in the USA and a top agent at the State Fair of Texas. He travels to the lawless foothills of Mexico to see the new face of the American carny. He exposes the truths about immigration, labor abuse, and living between two worlds. Comerford finds carnival people seeking meaning and love in their lives, and the answers always seem to be somewhere down the road.

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9781952693052

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Reviews

American OZ is an American masterpiece ... The brilliance of the book is in Comerford's sensitive and honorable way he details and describes the people - specifically the carnival workers. They are America's working poor. Kerry Lavelle, author, Lavelle Law Ltd. Majestic! Columnist, author, broadcaster Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune. A remarkable book, colorful, lively and filled with a cast of characters that would do a Fellini movie justice. Brilliant WGN 720 AM In search of astounding stories for his book, American OZ, journalist Michael Sean Comerford ... spent a year trekking 21,570 miles, mostly by hitchhiking across North America as a modern-day Odysseus ... A glorious, dangerous, lonely, exhilarating, joyful and life-altering year, Daily Herald Columnist Burt Constable. Reminiscent of The Big Fish and the gritty writings of Studs Terkel and John Steinbeck, with a dash of Jack Kerouac, Tony Horwitz, and even Hunter S. Thompson thrown in, American OZ will take you on the adventure of a lifetime. It will kick your COVID blues. Stephen Reddick, historian, educator Lyrical journalism. The prose is often lovely, and humorous at the same time, and succinct. But this book at its core is not poetry ... Comerford is a reporter at heart, and it shows. Mike Nichols, president, Badger Institute, and former Milwaukee Journal columnist. Unlike any book I've ever read! Buckle up and get ready for this book to bring you on the ride of a lifetime! Suzy Martin, writer/journalist Having been born and raised in the carnival business, I found it to be an extremely authentic look behind the curtain. When the lights go off you are escorted through the real life world of traveling carnivals and the people who move them. Dave Galyon. His brothers Donnie and Ronnie Galyon were conjoined twins with their own carnival exhibition.

Author Information

Michael Sean Comerford is a writer and Pulitzer Prize-nominated former international journalist who worked in Chicago, New York, Budapest, and Moscow. He's bicycled cross country three times and hitchhiked across America, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He's ridden freight trains and rounded-up cattle out West, studied Buddhism in the Himalayas, and won a heavyweight boxing championship in Ireland. He toured almost 100 countries, swam the headwaters of the Nile, fought off a hippo attack, and toured ecological disaster areas in the Amazon. Comerford's bylines have appeared in the Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald, Copley News Service, Budapest Sun, Budapest Business Journal and the Moscow Times. He lives in the Chicago area to be near his daughter Grace. He's promised her that he'll stay closer to home for a while.

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