For decades, Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, Sides crashes the redwood retreat of powerful military-industrialists, drops in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, joins a techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon, and bushwhacks through Meso-America with Mormon archaeologists seeking the lost tribes of Israel. As Sides visits Vegas, Memphis, Alaska's Iditarod Trail, he meets a diverse gallery of American visionaries, including Indian radical Russell Means, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, and the impossibly perky founder of Tupperware.