My first book, There is a Road in North Dakota," is my memoir of growing up Catholic in the 50s and 60s in North Dakota, studying in France, where I met my wife, and my return to the family beer business on the death of a brother. This book is about the Odysees I have expereinced: travels in Europe, learning to live in Mexico, about North Dakota, and what it is like to be the "Budman" in Bismarck, North Dakota. If you like David Sedaris, you will enjoy these wide-ranging chapters.

"Adventures with Sam" is Sam McQuade's collection of chapters about hunting, dogs, hunting dog trialing, fishing, mountain biking, and learning to fly airplanes...a "bucket list" of adventures replete with a cast of memorable characters and funny stories that you will relate to if you have ever tried any of these pursuits. Sam's writing style makes you feel part of each adventure. Join him in the cockpit of the airplane on his first solo flight. Shiver along with him in a goose pit in the pre-dawn cold of a North Dakota autumn morning. "Adventures with Sam" completes Sam's trilogy of a life lived fully. The first is "There is a Road in North Dakota: Memoirs of a Dakota Budman," the story of his life with all its twists and turns; the second is "Dakota Odyseus at Home and Abroad," his fascinating life travels.

The is the personal story of a family beer distributing business over three generations and how the business got passed on first from father to son, then son to daughter. It is a story that is relevant to any small family business. Parts of the story are informative, some poignant, and there are many funny stories. Most books about business are boring and involve the latest faddish business theory. That is not this book, which is about what happens in the real world, with real world examples personally lived and real world Dos and Don'ts from personal experience.

If you like David Sedaris you will like Sam McQuade. His stories are as funny and poignant, and his family is even more dysfuntional. Sam is the eldest child of seven. There are four left. "There is a Road in North Dakota" is his story, growing up Catholic in the 50s and 60s on the northern Great Plains, his travels and adventures in France, the auto accident deaths of two brothers, life as a college English professor, and his eventual return to Bismarck, ND, to enter the family beer business and endure years of an Oedipus struggle with his father. If a life can be described as a metaphor, Sam McQuade's life is a gravel road in North Dakota. You will enjoy the unmarked curves.