Award-winning author Brad Herzog ‘90 invites all Cornellians to a reading, discussion and signing of his new ravel memoir about his cross-country journey to Ithaca, TURN LEFT AT THE TROJAN HORSE: A Would-be Hero's American Odyssey.

Join Brad for wine and cheese and an opportunity to discuss what he describes as “the mid-life memoir of an Everyman searching for the hero within.” TURN LEFT AT THE TROJAN HORSE was the only nonfiction book selected to the June Indie Next “Great Reads” list, as chosen by independent booksellers nationwide.

To get started, you can read an excerpt of Chapter 1 from Cornell Alumni Magazine (www.cornellalumnimagazine.com -- “Epic Journey”). You can also watch a 2-minute video trailer about the book on Brad's website (http://bradherzog.com/turn_left.htm).

Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Time: 6:30pm for wine and cheese reception; 7pm reading
Location: Borders Books at 1360 Westwood Boulevard, Westwood
Parking: Street
Cost: Free
RSVP: Click here to RSVP!!!

Note: The CCLA Book Club will be reading this book and will meet at the bookstore for the discussion. More info: Lizzie Andrews - andrews.lizzie@gmail.com.  Those interested in reading the entire book in advance may enjoy meeting other CCLA book club members at the event who will be doing the same. Our CCLA book club meets monthly. 

More Info: Mindy Schleger at mindy.schleger@cornell.edu

Discoveries: 'Turn Left at the Trojan Horse'

By Susan Salter Reynolds, Special to the Los Angeles Times

July 11, 2010

This is how a quest should be done: You bundle up everything you know. You take stock of who you are and who you aren't. You head out armed with humility and outrageous playfulness. You look for meaning, laughing at your own self-consciousness.

A few years ago, Brad Herzog, half kidding, tried out for the show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and was accepted. With $64,000 under his belt and Regis breathing down his neck, he decided not to risk the next question. "Like Odysseus," he writes, "I chose conservatively — security over audacity. And I regret it, both fiscally and spiritually." Herzog took to the road, full of angst, a hero's journey in search of his lost soul. "I used to write from the heart — experimentally, enthusiastically. But in recent years my grand literary dreams have softened into moderate ambitions revolving around paying the mortgage."

Herzog is no stranger to the road trip as panacea: In 1999, he and his wife drove around the country in a Winnebago. They visited Pride, Ala.; Wisdom, Mont.; and Honor, Mich., in search of America — the result was the bestselling "States of Mind." In 2004, he wrote "Small World" after traveling to London, Wis.; Paris, Ky.; Moscow, Maine, and other small towns with big ambitions. In "Turn Left at the Trojan Horse," Herzog pokes under more American rocks on his Homeric Odyssey; in Athens, Ga., he thinks about leadership; in Troy, Ore., mortality; in Iliad, Mont., fear; Calypso, Mont., fate — and so on as he heads for a college reunion in Ithaca, N.Y.

Herzog's stitching is so good, so seamless — he follows Odysseus' story until it becomes his own. But "the myth does not make the man," he writes, "the man earns the myth." Near the end he visits the house he grew up in and the summer camp he went to as a boy. "It took me years to realize that comfort isn't necessarily complacence, and that my hunger to be somewhere else was really just a desire to explore, not an indictment of the place I was leaving." There's all this and so much more: Herzog looks, listens and gives us dozens of real characters and plenty of reasons to leave home.