The Man Who Walked Backward: Book Talk with Author Ben Montgomery

Award winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ben Montgomery will speak at the Safety Harbor Public Library on Thursday, February 7, 6:30 pm, about his most recent book, The Man Who Walked Backward. Copies will be available for sale and signing. The Man Who Walked Backward tells the story of Plennie Wingo, a man hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on Plennie’s small restaurant he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary – something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he’d lost. He decided to walk around the world – backwards. Montgomery, a former enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Grandma Gatewood’s Walk and The Leper Spy: The Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and was a 2010 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. He won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for the series For Their Own Good, about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school.