Editorial Content for Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Independent journalist and filmmaker Peter Santenello has been around the world more than once. In YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS, he combines his talents as a wordsmith with his concentrated attention to his native land in its 250th year.
This dynamic, dramatic, surprising and often comfortably amusing saga opens with an exploration of Amish communities. Santenello learns more about their unique mores as he travels by striking up chats with locals and often being noticed and assisted by them. He recognizes that the Amish --- with their buggies, close family ties and willingness to work hard --- can also have fun. They gladly share their contentment and spiritual uplift freely with strangers and one another.
"Santenello’s efforts have garnered four million YouTube subscribers who undoubtedly will wish to read his vibrant prose and share it with like-minded companions across a wide spectrum, inviting all to hit the pedal and follow in his well-chosen tracks."
In his trek through Alaska, Santenello absorbs and vividly depicts the many cultures, languages and traditions (some of which are ancient) that comprise that icy realm. Driving through “Deep Appalachia,” he finds unexpected alliances with some of the poorest people in America, former coal miners now persisting in the region that had been their home for generations --- “people who kept lights on, coal moving, factories running, families fed.”
In rural Mississippi, Santenello senses a pioneering spirit, revealed in little-known backroads communities like the redwood forests of California; the Chesapeake Bay with its colonial heritage; the Hamptons, redolent with “rebel holdouts”; and the Louisiana Bayou, where Cajun culture still survives. Through these explorations, he gradually comes to understand that America is too big to be homogeneous but instead can take pride in its “vast and beautiful geography” and its seemingly ingrown openness to choice and change.
Santenello began his travels as a young man with a high school buddy. They traversed many states and crossed the Canadian border, camped, and enjoyed local folks and scenarios, all while battling a dwindling budget. Through these many sudden variations and subtle transformations, Santenello became determined to survive and succeed by continually hitting the roads. His focus on the United States has occasioned hundreds of effervescent videos introducing indigenous spokespeople and exuding a fearless determination to tell us everything he sees, hears and inculcates.
Santenello’s efforts have garnered four million YouTube subscribers who undoubtedly will wish to read his vibrant prose and share it with like-minded companions across a wide spectrum, inviting all to hit the pedal and follow in his well-chosen tracks.
Teaser
Have you ever swapped stories on a porch with Amish snowbirds in Florida? Searched for reindeer with the Siberian Yupik in Alaska? Been a guest on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou? Peter Santenello hadn’t either until, after years spent traveling through 85 countries and living abroad, he realized the most unfamiliar territory was often his own American backyard. And so, with a camera in hand and an open mind, he began visiting communities across the country, places that most of the media overlooks or misrepresents, from tiny towns in Appalachia to the streets of East LA. What began as curiosity became --- one story at a time --- an intimate, revealing portrait of America today.
Promo
Have you ever swapped stories on a porch with Amish snowbirds in Florida? Searched for reindeer with the Siberian Yupik in Alaska? Been a guest on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou? Peter Santenello hadn’t either until, after years spent traveling through 85 countries and living abroad, he realized the most unfamiliar territory was often his own American backyard. And so, with a camera in hand and an open mind, he began visiting communities across the country, places that most of the media overlooks or misrepresents, from tiny towns in Appalachia to the streets of East LA. What began as curiosity became --- one story at a time --- an intimate, revealing portrait of America today.
About the Book
Come along with an adventurous and charismatic independent journalist (perhaps you're one of his four million subscribers on YouTube) on a journey through some of the very best of America, reminding us of all the reasons we’ve got to love this place and one another.
Have you ever swapped stories on a porch with Amish snowbirds in Florida? Searched for reindeer with the Siberian Yupik in Alaska? Been a guest on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou?
Peter Santenello hadn’t either until, after years spent traveling through 85 countries and living abroad, he realized the most unfamiliar territory was often his own American backyard. And so, with a camera in hand and an open mind, he began visiting communities across the country, places that most of the media overlooks or misrepresents, from tiny towns in Appalachia to the streets of East LA.
What began as curiosity became --- one story at a time --- an intimate, revealing portrait of America today.
From road trips and chance encounters to dinners shared in locals’ homes, YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS captures what makes this country so dynamic, so resilient, and, most of all, so very human. Because what Peter discovered on his travels wasn’t a nation torn in two. He found something more complex and more powerful: people who want to be seen, who are willing to listen, and who still believe we’re more alike than we are different.
With humor, exuberance and reverence for the human spirit, YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS is a celebration of the United States that exists far beyond the headlines --- and an invitation to sit down, open up, and rediscover the soul of this place that we call home.
Audiobook available, read by Peter Santenello
