When her plush and comfy life suddenly and unexpectedly fell apart, Brooke and her dog Cloud set out to defy the odds. She put on a knapsack and started walking. If this is a man's world as they say, living on the streets is no place for a young woman. She was able to navigate her way through challenges and obstacles, getting odd jobs along the way, and hopping freight trains as a main mode of transport, until one day she awoke in the Red Wood forest, looked around the make shift camp built upon mounds of dirty kid trash and hidden back into the trees, and realized she had become... a hobo... and would ultimately come to know exactly what it means to survive.

No one said life on the road would be easy. Navigating the rails, mapping bus lines, and hitching rides. Dealing with hunger when you don't have a nickel to chew on. Picking up an odd job here and making a few bucks there. But that's why it's exciting. It's one hell of an adventure. It's a thrilling road to follow if you're up to the challenge. And this book's your back-pocket saving grace. As you flip to the next flop, you'll need to know how to get by in order to stay one step ahead. Realize: a hobo isn't some bum looking for a handout. You need to be ready to put in the effort. If you want to make your way in the Jungle and along your route, you need the know-how provided within. This is the textbook to your open-road education.

On a cold, gray day in 1991, a kid named Eddy Joe Cotton left home with nothing but a warm jacket, some well-worn boots, and a few crumpled dollar bills. His father had just fired him, not for the first time, but for the last. He didn’t see his father again for two years. But this is not the story of a runaway—it is a tale of an unorthodox road to adulthood. By taking to the trains, Eddy Joe Cotton learned the difficulty of life lived on the margins, the fading importance of a once-celebrated American folk hero, and the ultimate meaning of freedom.

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

Garrison Keillor meets Jack Kerouac meets Mahatma Gandhi in this wry, roadwise scripture. Hobo Sapien is a series of freight train parables born out of the author's twelve-plus years riding freight trains, combined with lessons learned in his seven-year stint as a Self-Realization Fellowship monk, plus the added bonus of fascinating railroad history. Non-fiction readers buy books to learn something, for reference, or to be entertained. Hobo Sapien fills all three bills. Readers will get a unique immersion into the underground world of the hobo. The spiritual takes are written with a subtle humor that helps the medicine go down. It is not your parent's self-help book.Armchair adventurers, rail fans, spiritual seekers, and academia nuts will all gather intriguing information from this missive. It is vastly different from other hobo books because of its unparalleled combination of adventure, rail history, humor, and spirituality. The author's background is also unique and varied. Not many hobos have gone from Yale to rail or from hunk to monk.

From playwright and TV writer Alena Smith comes a hilarious and irreverent illustrated book based on the popular Twitter feed (@tweenhobo), featuring a young spunky girl who sets out in search of freedom, adventure, and her own personal obsession: Justin Bieber tickets. Get ready to laugh and learn with the littlest hobo. She’s only twelve years old, but a “hard twelve.” You’ll meet her friends: Stumptown Jim (her weatherbeaten BFFL); Tin Cap Earl (who’s always down to shoot a junkyard haul video); Toothpick Frank (who learns to love Pinterest); Salt Chunk Annie (a “woman of the night,” whatever that means); and Hot Johnny Two-Cakes (who Tween Hobo swears she does NOT have a crush on). Find out how she survives, thanks in part to strawberry lip gloss. You’ll hear her take on major cultural events (“I go off a fiscal cliff every time I go near a Claire’s”). And you’ll enjoy beautiful hand-rendered illustrations that bring out the beauty in her words—just like how eyeliner makes a hobo’s look really pop. Often snarky and frequently ridiculous, this imaginative journal-like book includes maps, jokes, laughs, doodles, tips, hobo symbols (“House with a triangle on top means PIZZA PARTY!!!), games, stories, and more. So grab your iPhone and wrap it in a handkerchief, tie it to a stick, and let’s roll!