From a thru-hiker perspective, there was one extremely interesting passage in the middle, though. One of the perpetrators, in a letter to a woman he's walking away from a relationship with, writes the following poem (which in the book is identified as being a quote of someone else's work, but is unattributed):
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
"Sweet!" I thought when I read that. "I've got to go source that on the Internet."
It turns out that it's from "The Spell of the Yukon," by Robert W. Service. And I found the entire poem out on the Web.
Having read it, I can sure see why the quote stopped where it did.