OUR LADY, QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAYS: A Memoir

“Wow – you can go home again. I just did by reading my brother Tim’s Our Lady, Queen of the Highways. Tim transports his readers back in time to those epic cross-country journeys of our youth in our family station wagon. As we traverse the country, he brilliantly intersperses seminal moments from his own life’s personal journey. He masterfully captures it all – all that those trips were, what they opened up to us, the new horizons they placed in front of us, and what those journeys came to symbolize for us our lives. And it’s all delivered wonderfully in elegant and evocative prose that would make our mother - the English teacher and lifetime lover of literature - proud.” —Dan Coonan, Author of Presidential Spirits, a novel

“Our Lady, of the Queen of the Highways is a wonderfully clear-eyed, unpretentious, and heart-felt memoir of growing up in a large, tightly knit Irish-Catholic family in Southern California during the Baby Boom years. Dubbed a “love letter to my parents” by author Tim Coonan, the reader becomes a veritable fly on the wall as the Coonan gang climbs into the family’s green1966 Chevy Bel-Air Station Wagon summer after summer to crisscross the country to visit family and discover the wonders of America. Tim skilfully weaves his own personal coming-of-age journey in alternate chapters and by the book’s end we fully understand how love, faith, and family has shaped the author’s passage into the full bloom of adulthood.” —Michael K. Ward, Author of Ghost Riders in the Sky: The Life of Stan Jones, The Singing Ranger

Publishing date: August 12, 2022

Language: English

Paperback: 170 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1-958419-05-2

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches

Tim Coonan is a retired wildlife biologist (30 years with the National Park Service, most notably at Channel Islands and Death Valley) who currently teaches science at a Catholic school in Ventura, California. He grew up in suburban Los Angeles (from which family road trips departed), and attended Notre Dame, with graduate work at Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Tim has co-authored the definitive (granted, the only) book on an endangered species, the island fox of southern California’s Channel Islands. Father to two girls, Tim lives in Ventura, California.