Rating: 
Summary: Preachy & Dull
Review: Overall the book is pretty dull. In order to liven up sections Heat=Moon tries to get us worried about whether or not he'll hit his timeline or even sink the boat. After a few of these exagerrated concerns are told the remaining ones are not at all believable. Every few pages he also likes to remind us how bad Americans are at keeping our environment spotless and wild. This coming from a man cruising the rivers in a twin engine boat, and on shallower parts even puts a motor on his canoe. This, also coming from a man who would not have gotten past New York if it wasn't for the Erie Canal. Preaching, during a book like this, is normal and expected. He just takes it over the top and by the end of the book I was rooting for another dam to be built. Finally, there are too many stories about himself and how he was feeling and not enough anecdotes about people he met along the way. It's those colorful stories that usually make travel books likes these interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Obstructions of his own making
Review: One of the seven Nikawa co-pilots William Least Heat-Moon lumped into the singular entity of "Pilotis" was a woman, New Jersey registered nurse Linda Barton. That one female among seven presented Heat-Moon -- or as I knew him at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, professor Bill Trogdon -- with a little problem: To keep to his plan to create a singular Pilotis from this seven-headed hydra, he could never refer to the character with gender-specific he-she pronouns lest he reveal on which segment of the cross-country river journey Barton accompanied him (although he did slip once by calling his Erie Canal companion a "squire"). The result was an entire thick volume full of some of the most awkward, forced sentence structure I've encountered since substitute teaching sixth-graders at Orchard Farm Middle School, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Bad or inexperienced writers paint themselves into such untenable corners. The Bill Trogdon I knew from the wonderfully flowing "Blue Highways" should have been better than this. What possible reason did he have for this incredibly clumsy device which he created and then had to nurse Boone-County-Ham-handedly through all those pages? It wasn't the co-pilots' privacy, for he names them all in a foreword. Was his resulting self-aggrandizing focus on himself at the expense of his fellow travelers devised so that readers who loved him from his past work would end up despising him as much as he despised himself? The Bill Trogdon I knew in the '80s was not a pedantic boor. His quest was to gather insight with every mile and then share it with us, not to excruciatingly pound us with what he already knew before he rounded the next bend. I longed to travel every blue-highway mile with him in Ghost Dancing. The 20-years-older Trogdon aboard Nikawa seemed more Ted Baxter than Mark Twain, and I wouldn't want to travel around the block with him. What a pity. What a waste.
Rating: 
Summary: Water-Weary Traveler Challenges America's Tributaries
Review: This book is like the journey the author undertakes. There are frequent poignant moments, but they come after long stretches of tedium, with a final payoff at the end which makes it all worth it. I am a fan of the author's first book, Blue Highways. I read it in paperback and gave the book away to a charity. I remembered the book with such an intense degree of fondness that I re-purchased it just to return it to my bookcase, where it still resides. I actually could not NOT own it, which is to say, I had to have it. River Horse never really grabbed me in the same way. First, there are a few annoyances: the chapter titles, the name "Pilotis" (I never did get used to it), and the inadequate maps. Several times I found myself looking for spots on one of the book's maps, locations taken straight out of the narrative, but never did find them. It was as if the maps were prepared aside from the book. I recommend that readers get themselves a good map, even little ones copied from an atlas, to have along for the read, section by section. Another impression I get is that it is a narrative based on observations, not insight. Potential readers should note the book's other name; it is very much a "logbook of a ship." Despite references to marriage and ill parents and such, the author doesn't share much of himself on the pages here. My knowledge of American river geography was poor beforehand and I don't know how much it improved having read River Horse. I did learn a smattering of good words, ones new to me: rampike, tautological, slumgullion, oddment, and fluviomariner. And a few newly created words, like "yondering," as in, to look down yonder. There is a great deal more to be learned here, however. The author tells us that the Hudson River is a fjord, the only one in the contiguous states. That it is, mile for mile, richer in history, art, and literature than any other US river. That DeWitt Clinton's face was on cigarette tax stamps for nearly 100 years. That many canal towns are named after Mediterranean cities. That the east side of a river is deeper because of the earth's rotation, and that wind makes a river very complicated. That American perceptions of Indians come from the Sioux. That much of our weather is brewed up on the American Plains. That Lake Sakakawea (in North Dakota) is the largest manmade lake in the US. That the only contiguous state wider than Montana is Texas ("with its eccentric borders"). But there's a lot of reading ahead of you if you take up this book. So why take it on at all? Because, as the author's companion notes, "A river is not just about water."
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