The Aimless Life

Reviews / Votes

"Worcester, who felt that he never struck it rich and hence the title, has left us with his life, richly observed and remembered."-Reed Weimer, Denver Westerners Roundup "Leonard Worcester Jr. lived across interesting times and places and, thankfully, he wrote about a lot of what he experienced. Here is the everyday set against the backdrop, and occasionally the foreground, of world-shaping events. Andrew Offenburger knows this terrain well but he lets the story unspool with a light touch, always helping us frame Worcester's story in context and circumstance. The result is pitch perfect: the life and the times of a historical figure whom history would otherwise hide from view."-William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West "This beautifully edited tale of a jack-of-all-trades adrift in the U.S. West and Mexico in an age of empire and revolution captures the spirit of its border-crossing time, opening a portal into the wider horizons of North American borderlands history."-Samuel Truett, author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands "The itinerant Leonard Worcester Jr. had a knack for being in big places at big times, from the mining towns of Leadville and Cripple Creek to revolutionary Mexico. Edited adeptly by Andrew Offenburger, Worcester's memoir offers a compelling glimpse into many familiar stories of the turn of the twentieth century-and as much into what Worcester neglects as to what he describes."-Derek R. Everett, author of Creating the American West: Boundaries and Borderlands