This classic account of self discovery and railroad life describes Linda Grant Niemann's travels as an itinerant brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Boomer combines travelogue, Wild West adventure, sexual memoir, and closely observed ethnography. A Berkeley Ph.D., Niemann turned her back on academia and set out to master the craft of railroad brakeman, beginning a journey of sexual and subcultural exploration and traveling down a path toward recovery from alcoholism. In honest, clean prose, Niemann treks off the beaten path and into the forgotten places along the rail lines, finding true American characters with colorful pasts—and her true self as well.

"Niemann has a taut, lyrically restrained but vividly descriptive style, with an observational vigilance befitting a brakeman's mindset, and her narrative clips along like a boxcar rolling through the yard. June/July 2011"—Bloom Magazine
"Boomer is a fascinating mix of fact, history, self-confession, self-accusation, and self-forgiveness—a diary of both emotional relationships and travel."—Pasatiempo
"A candid, unsentimental, and un-sensationalized account of a woman's exploration into the diversity of her complex nature—sexual, intellectual, spiritual."—Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles
"Ma[kes] the railroad experience come alive with all its grit, danger, romance, and general outrageousness. . . . Possibly the finest book I've ever read about the actual experience of working on the railroad."—Kevin Keefe, Trains Magazine
"Beyond the tracks, Niemann paints incandescent American landscapes. Inside the trains, and inside the 'rails,' beds, and bars, Niemann paints innerscapes of anguish, exhaustion, and razor-edged humor from which no light escapes. No light except the author's brilliance."—Helene Moglen, University of California, Santa Cruz
"As a bisexual, counter-cultural-type intellectual, she doesn't truly fit in any place, and she 'can't go home again'; but her marginality and her openness give her a privileged perspective from which to view the strange workings of class and sexual politics in America."—Bella Brodski, Sarah Lawrence College

Linda Grant Niemann teaches creative nonfiction at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. She is author of Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century (IUP, 2010).