Sarah van Gelder will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26 to discuss her new travelogue, “The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From a 12,000 Mile Journey Through a New America.”

America faces huge challenges today: climate change, social injustice, racism, violence and economic insecurity to name a few. A journalist, van Gelder suspected that there were solutions and she went looking for them, not in the centers of power where people are richly rewarded for their allegiance to the status quo, but off the beaten track, in rural communities, small towns and neglected urban neighborhoods. She bought a used pickup truck and camper and set off on a 12,000-mile journey through 18 states, dozens of cities and towns, and five Native American reservations.

From the ranches of Montana to the coalfields of Kentucky to the urban cores of Chicago and Detroit, van Gelder discovered people and communities who are remaking America from the ground up.

Join her as she meets the quirky and the committed, the local heroes and the healers who, under the mass media’s radar, are getting stuff done. The common thread running through their work was best summed up by a phrase she saw on a mural in Newark, New Jersey: “We the People LOVE This Place.”