About the Author...
Brad Newsham was born in Chevy Chase, Maryland in 1951, and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
His mother is the daughter of Czech immigrants who in the early 1900's moved to Western Pennsylvania, where her
father worked as an underground coal miner. Brad's father worked for the CIA as a cartographer for 33 years. Both
of Brad's parents were Christian Scientists, and although Brad was raised in that faith, he currently claims no religion
—except, perhaps, reading. He is a graduate of Principia Upper School in St. Louis, Missouri (1968), and Principia College
in Elsah, Illinois (1972), where he received a degree with a double major in history and sociology, but where his main focus
was basketball. He has an older sister and two younger brothers. He worked for a year-and-a-half as an underground molybdenum
miner in Colorado in the mid-70's, and then moved on to Idaho, where he and two friends built a log house. From 1978 - 1981, he
worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer in Sandpoint, Idaho, and Tucson, Arizona. Moving to San francisco in 1982, he
first worked as a bank secretary at Wells Fargo bank. Since 1985, he has been a San Francisco Yellow Cab driver. He is also a
book reviewer and contributor for the San Francisco Chronicle and is the author of All the Right Places (Villard, 1989). He
lives in Oakland, California with his wife Rhonda, and their three-year-old daughter, Sarah.
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Brad's earliest travel experiences involved coast-to-coast jaunts in the family station wagon, exploring with his family
whatever back road his father chose. After college, he hitchhiked around the United States by himself several times. In a YMCA
in New York City in 1974, he finished reading James Michener's The Drifters, and decided he had to go to Europe. Eight months
later, he was working in a Swiss train station restaurant. It was on this same trip that he later visited Afghanistan, where he made
the promise to himself that would become the basis for Take Me With You. Brad has traveled in all 50 of the United States, and
visited over 40 countries. He has logged over 20,000 miles hitchhiking, and circled the globe four times.
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