Take a humorist from the Great White North -- one part Bob and Doug McKenzie, the other Bill Bryson -- feed him lots of sake, and set him loose hitchhiking his way through polite Japanese society. The result is one of the warmest and funniest travelogues you've read. It had never been done before. Not in four thousand years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. And, as Ferguson learns, it illustrates that to travel is better than to arrive.

It is 1939, and Jack McGreary is adrift in the faded boomtown of Paradise Flats in West Texas. When a pair of fast-talking swindlers named Virgil and Miss Rose blow through town, Jack falls in with them. Together they go on a crime spree across the American Southwest, staging a series of elaborate and often hilarious cons.