Brotherton's Travels

Equal parts travelogue, cultural study, and picaresque autobiography, Brotherton’s Travels is a probing and insightful book that challenges conventional perceptions. Having lived and worked in the United States, France, Ecuador, and Spain, Greg Boyd brings a border-crossing sensibility to his memoirs. Raised and educated in upstate New York during the early 1960s, then in the free-wheeling culture of 70s Southern California, Boyd’s upbringing resulted in a highly developed sense of irony. Whether telling the story of his mysterious Brotherton ancestors or describing his experiences in small press publishing, teaching, and the arts, Boyd pulls back the curtain to reveal the absurdity hiding in plain sight. Having left Paradise, California prior to the conflagration that wiped it off the map, he remembers a town that no longer exists. Having grown up near the site of a series of nuclear accidents at the Santa Susana Research Laboratory in the city of Los Angeles, he now lives in the Spanish town on which the U.S. Air Force once dropped a handful of nuclear warheads. Whether describing conversations with a wandering peddler of psychedelics, a body-piercing expert, or a victim of serial alien abductions, or describing what it’s like to catch a wave as a surfer, teach classes in Taekwondo, or be an expat, Boyd’s memoirs are full of the inventiveness and explosiveness critics have praised in his fiction. The book concludes with “Planet Hazmat,” an alternative autobiographical narrative that examines the effects of environmental and cultural toxicity.