William Least Heat-Moon

I've read many travelogues over the years. Some were bad, some were good, some were so good they made me anxious to take a similar journey (and sometimes I did). Of them all, this is the best.

It's William Least Heat Moon's circumnavigation of the United States, all the while avoiding the sterile super-highways usual for that purpose and trying to stay on the blue roads ... the secondary thoroughfares colored blue on road atlases before we all became reliant on GPS.

It's not just that he has a gift for a turn of phrase—a waitress with a "grudge of a face." Nor that he can describe the natural world so well that you can picture it—the Pine Barrens "six hundred fifty thousand acres (equal to Grand Canyon National Park) ... pitch pines and oaks and white cedars ... cranberry bogs and fields of high-bush blueberries opening the woods ... a stream [where] tannins had turned the transparent water the color of cherry cola .. a silence as if civilization had disappeared." Not even that he knows us—Americans—so well: "You might as well ask [the American traveler] to share his toothbrush as his bathroom."

It's all that plus a perfect blend of "This is what I saw" and "This is whom I met." It's a picture of place and people, many of them gone or going now. Colorful, rich, full of stories about how things got the way they are now, the people that embraced the changes and those who resisted them.

And you learn how to rate diners by the number of calendars on wall.

Absolutely read it.… (meer)

I read this in the 80's, around the time it was first published. I remember liking it a lot although for some reason I no longer had my copy. So I recently bought another one, thinking it would be a good time to read it again.
I hated it. Read half way through and decided I had had enough. The guy is full of himself. No one is a real traveler but him. Anyone not in a cheap self-customized van is a tourist and tourists are not OK. Taking photos is not OK -- only for tourists. I didn't want to pick it up and when I did, I couldn't wait to put it down, and finally decided to move on, so to speak.… (meer)

I wondered if I would find a 600+ page book about a single county in Kansas able to hold my interest. While it took me awhile to get through, reading only a chapter or two each day, the answer was an emphatic yes. The author so completely immerses you in a sense of the place he is exploring, it was impossible to stop reading it. On occasion, I skimmed through some of the "From the Commonplace Books" chapters of citations from other works about Kansas, but I never skipped through the author's own writings. Particularly recommended for fans of the travel genre.… (meer)

A classic American road trip. Since author William Least Heat Moon is Osage, he’s about as classic American as you can get. In something of a funk over loss of his job and deterioration of his marital relationship, he packs a sleeping bag and some cooking equipment in his van and heads out, passing through Nameless, Tennessee; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Dime Box, Texas; Shelby, Montana; and miscellaneous other cities, towns, and villages. Least Heat Moon mostly stays on the fringes of the country; he covers the center in a later book, Prairy Earth.

He stops and talks everywhere, and people open up to him; and he does a lot of self-contemplation, thus making this as much an autobiography as a travel book; in fact there isn’t that much description of geography (although there’s quite a bit of history). This is an easy and rewarding read; recommended.… (meer)