you shall know our velocity by dave eggers

As you can't actually get the hardcover anymore on, the hardcover review is pretty worthless. The actual text of the book is different in the paperback edition than in the hardcover. If your reading the reviews of this book and at the bottom it says 'Refers to the Hardcover Edition', then you should pay no attention to that review. It is definately a superbly crafted work.

And even if it is a little modernistic or existentialistic, Eggers' combination of such with his own style of wit and irony make it genuine. Eggers' paints a beautiful picture, if less loudly innovative, at least as heartbreaking and emotional as his memoir. It is enjoyable just to be in the company of the characters and the antics they pull. Will's rememberance of his childhood are the most beautiful passages. It is not about the destinations, or the journey there, but about the things that lie in the past. Yet the fact that Will and Hand don't succeed is really the success of the story. It is the 'fourth world', the desolate regions of the world where people rarely ever come and rarely ever stay. This is a travel-adventure story made up of airport terminals, hotel rooms, empty beaches, vacant bars, desolate mountaintops and lonely woods. Will tries to hop a horse buggy to hand the driver some cash, but falls on his face instead they drive to the top of a mountain at night, looking for poor mountaindwellers, but find it empty and silent.

Their trip is a failure from start to finish - they never escape what they want to leave behind, and they never find where they want to be. Instead they end up in Senegal, Morocco, Estonia, and Latvia, and unlike most adventure stories, rather than finding adventure they find only a dead end. So most of the places they decide to go to - Greenland, Siberia, Egypt, Mongolia, etc.

They do it spontaneously, however, hoping that Providence will guide them to where they are supposed to be. So he decides to travel around the world handing out money to poor strangers with his friend Hand. The main character, Will, is diametrically different: he is melancholy and lonely, having recently lost his best friend and been physically beaten by a couple of anonymous attackers. While Eggers' first book was angry and bustling with energy and chaos, here he takes a more leisurely pace, no less staggering, but in a more subtle and less fanfare way. In many ways, YSKOV is the polar opposite of AHWOSG.

You shall know our velocity by dave eggers