DRINKING FROM THE STREAM follows two young men on the run from themselves. The story is set in the early 1970s, a time of violent upheavals when the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War marked a generation. Jake, a Nebraska kid turned Louisiana roughneck, flees the guilt of a killing on an oil rig. Karl, a disillusioned American student at Oxford, escapes the wreckage of the sixties and a painful relationship. Their paths cross. Together they jump on a plane to explore East Africa by thumb, drifting through Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, and bumping into coups, massacres and love affairs as they go. Along the way they pick up Howard (South African), Beatrice (German), and Swee’Pea (Ugandan). The book stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes region of Africa and on to Chile, and it ties private coming-of-age stories to state violence and postcolonial chaos.