Tom Miller has been writing about conflict and culture in the Americas for close to 50 years. His books include On the Border, an account of his travels along the U.S.-Mexico frontier; The Panama Hat Trail about South America; Trading With the Enemy, which takes readers on his journeys through Cuba; and, about the American Southwest, Revenge of the Saguaro.
Where Was I? A Travel Writer's Memoir zigs and zags through the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention, smokes marijuana on the rooftop of a comfortable South American hotel, and spends the better part of a year traipsing around Cuba. Miller, a veteran of the anti (Vietnam) war movement and the underground press of the 1960s, spent months with migrants, musicians, and muck-rakers. He wrote about the Third Country between the United States and Mexico for the New York Times, and tracked down the origins of the song "La Bamba." In Spain he located an original 1605 first printing of Don Quijxote, and in Cuba held in his hands Ernest Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Writer Adam Hochschild says Where Was I? contains "sharp observations from a man who's been everywhere you'd ever want to go, known everyone you'd ever want to meet, and brought it all alive in a voice you wish you had." Martin Cruz Smith says "Miller has the passion, wit, and style of a great journalist." Linda Ronstadt simply says, "I am a Tom Miller fan."