CNN Money editor Mark Mooney spent two years roving the planet more than half a lifetime ago.
Mark Mooney
Now, the longtime Maplewood resident has published an audiobook titled, “Three Cents a Mile,” chronicling the journey.
Mooney calls it “a rollicking, exciting and often poignant tale of how I hitchhiked and worked my way around the world, through the Iranian revolution, Mother Teresa’s convent, a Malaysian opium den, and the camps of the Khmer Rouge. It is about the outrageous characters I met along the way, the reasons they were on the road. And, ultimately, why I was on the road.”
The trip, which lasted from 1978 to 1980, crossed a pre-internet iPhone world and Mooney passed through regions that are now off limits for Westerners. The audiobook allows the listener to step back into a world where electronic communication was not instant and constant and where GPS was not available to the peripatetic journalist. It was a world where one could truly get lost — and, in the process, find a few things.
The book is garnering rave reviews on Amazon, as well as 4 out of 5 stars from online reviewer DWD’s Review of Books where the reviewer at first finds Mooney’s non-professional reading style a bit jarring but later writes, “his personal style grew on me and there are times when the reader can hear that he is genuinely moved by having to actually speak the words of difficult passages and that adds to the story in a way that a professional reader could not.”
Why tell the story now?
“I decided to make it an audiobook because it was a story that I’d been asked about often over the years and decided I wanted to tell the tale myself,” said Mooney.
And Mooney clearly has the chops to tell this tale: He been a writer, editor and traveler for the four decades of his journalism career. His by-line has been attached to stories from war zones, earthquakes, major trials, and presidential campaign stops. The datelines have included Kuwait, Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Vietnam, Thailand.
In the end, “Three Cents a Mile” is a trip worth taking, for both the author and the listener.
