Rating: 
Summary: Ih-nnnteresting
Review: It took me two and half months two finish, but I enjoyed reading Blue Highways (for the most part). William Least Heat-Moon has a strong storyteller's voice (sometimes a little too strong) and his experiences in small town, backroad, no-name America are foreign enough to be interesting. I have a better idea of the history and the diversity of America from his regurgitation of local anecdotes, but I think if I lived in a blue-highways small town, I would be bored reading. In places, the narrative is self-concious and over-dramatic, like he's trying to describe a bowl of spaghetti to someone who has never tasted it -- spaghetti's my favorite food, but I have to be sitting over a bowl to appreciate it's greatness. Plus, I would have liked him to describe more of his feelings and talked less about road conditions. The feelings he did describe were so grounded in anti-urban ideology and strong I AM MAN convictions that I didn't relate to half of the book. Blue Highways alienated me as a city-dweller and as a woman, but I did enjoy the Whitman quotes and the parts about the monk, the hitchhiker evangelist, Selma Alabama, and the towns I've driven through myself (SHELBY, MT!).
Rating: 
Summary: A ROAD BOOK TO ENJOY
Review: Just finished this book and thoroughly enjoyed it.Have read several others by E.W.Teale,Steinbeck,Twain,R.T.Peterson,L.McMurtry,P.Dunne,K.Kaufmann and in my opinion this was up there with the best of them.Although I must admit, I found the first half of the book more interesting than the second.This may have been because the people in the areas were more colorful or perhaps the author was tiring a bit.Recommend it as a good read.
Rating:
Summary: A ROAD BOOK TO ENJOY
Review: Just finished this book and thouroughlt enjoyed it.Have read several others by E.W.Teale,Steinbeck,Twain,R.T.Peterson,L.McMurtry,P.Dunne,K.Kaufaan and in my opinion this was up there with the best of them.Although I must admit I found the first half of the book more interesting than the second.Tis may have been because the people in the areas were more colorful or perhaps the author was tiring a bit.Recommend it as a good read.
Rating:
Summary: ONE OF THE BEST I'VE READ and REREAD
Review: Like many I first read this work over twenty years ago. I admit that I reread if every few years. Not only is it a wonderful travel book, which at first glance, it is just that, a travel book, but it is much more. It is a search for a missing part of a man's life, one, I truely hope the author found. It is very well written. The author has a wonderful command of the language, and is a wonderful story teller. This is truely one of the few classics which came out of that era. I had to laugh, and sort of cry at the same time when I read a recent, previous review here were the young man claimed he was apprently forced (good for his teacher) to read this book for a English Gifted and Talented Class in High School. He hated it. I guess everone has their own cup of tea, but in my work I do run into a number of contemporary (gifted High School English children who pretty well know it all) folks in these classes...that is where the crying part comes in...I truely am worried about us. Be that as it may, if you want to bite into a great read, a timeless read, and come away,I think, a better person, then I highly recommend this one..Warning though..you will actually be forced to think while reading this one.
Rating:
Summary: Blue Highways Changed My Life
Review: This book entered my life in 1988 when I happened to mention to a literate friend that I planned to quit my job and tour America. She recommended this book as good reading and sure enough I found Blue Highways to be the perfect outline for my own journey.I hit the road in the spring of 1989 in a '69 VW Camper and followed Bill's philosophy to take the smallest roads possible. My God! I can still remember poking along the Louisiana Bayou's on Hwy 82 like it was yesterday. Traveling along the backroads at a slow and easy pace is the only real way to see America. Whenever I need to reconnect with what was the best two months of my life I pull out Blue Highways and my own trip journal. While I agree with the author that much has changed, and not for the better, even more of what is best of America is still waiting to be discovered.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: This book is nothing short of outstanding. Every high school in America should make reading this book a requirement.
Rating:
Summary: America's history is lying away from the Interstates
Review: This book of travels is fascinating because the author takes his subject from an angle that we are not used to. He decides to tour America using only the blue highways, those highways that are not Interstates nor even US highways. So he gets away from the motoring crowd and discovers another America, an America that lives in some tradition, in some order that is based on stable connections with nature and with social communities. He also tries to discover America and its history by meeting people and exploring local history, the history of small villages or cities and their citizens. His history is more story than history but it is very human and deeply fed with a culture that the franchised facade we know everyday may us think it has completely disappeared, or even that it has never existed. This constant delving into the deeper layers of our reality is giving us some energy to resist the franchising process and to look for men and women who have made this country and are still giving this country some tasty flesh and thrilling energy. We are glad to understand that America really is what we hope it is, a deeply human and humane culture and not only the fast-running and media-superficial Internet glasswindow that hides the back-shop and the men who work behind the wings.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant writing and Brilliant reading!
Review: This is a brilliantly funny book, but frankly I recommend the reading on audio tape because Keith Szarabajka (the gruffly stick-his-finger-in-the-fan Mickey Kostmayer of The Equalizer) makes it even better. His sexy, gravelly voice, is the perfect foil for Least Heath-Moon's utterly droll stroll through the forgotten highways across the US. The wit is incisive, about his personal life and the small towns and villages the blue highways(the roads mark in blue on US maps). These were once the main arteries of the US highways system, but are the 'Norman Bates' now forgotten restaurants, motels and quirky little people that refuse to give up their way of life.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Adventure
Review: This is a classic in travel essays. Awesome stories, but a bit long-winded.
Rating:
Summary: One of my 5 favorite books
Review: This is a great travalogue of personal discovery. By far his best work. I feel it is one of the best travelogues out there.
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