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Rating: 
Summary: great trip
Review: Jenny Diski clearly had a great trip and this book proves how even a 'non-traveler' can easily fall beneath the spell of long-distance train travel. Anyone planning to follow her example and journey around North America by train should also get hold of the excellent USA by Rail guidebook by John Pitt.
Rating: 
Summary: Is this a travel book or a memoir?
Review: Subtitle to this book is "daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions." The author travels by freighter from England to the U.S., then around the edges of the U.S. by train. She talks to people and records their conversations, most of which take place in the trains' smoking sections. None of them are particularly interesting. I read the whole book, but found it narcisistic (she admits she's a narcisist) full of tales about her days in English mental institutions, and not that entertaining. PLUS: get her an editor - please. It's Willie Mays, not Willie May. It's St.Paul-Minneapolis, not St. Paul's-Minneapolis. And the Mississippi river is certainly not in North Dakota. Then there are the English usages. What are pilchards? What is a tannoy? One person she meets says what he'd like to do with his life is "mess about on boats." No American would say that. If you want to read a good travel book, stick to Paul Theroux. If you want an interesting memoir look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: great trip
Review: Subtitle to this book is "daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions." The author travels by freighter from England to the U.S., then around the edges of the U.S. by train. She talks to people and records their conversations, most of which take place in the trains' smoking sections. None of them are particularly interesting. I read the whole book, but found it narcisistic (she admits she's a narcisist) full of tales about her days in English mental institutions, and not that entertaining. PLUS: get her an editor - please. It's Willie Mays, not Willie May. It's St.Paul-Minneapolis, not St. Paul's-Minneapolis. And the Mississippi river is certainly not in North Dakota. Then there are the English usages. What are pilchards? What is a tannoy? One person she meets says what he'd like to do with his life is "mess about on boats." No American would say that. If you want to read a good travel book, stick to Paul Theroux. If you want an interesting memoir look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Very poor ¿ not a great Travel Book
Review: This is the first book I've read by Jenni Diski, and I'm told it's not typical of her work. Certainly this was disappointing. It's not a conventional travelogue; in fact after 70 pages (25% of the book) she still hadn't got on the train!Throughout she shows a brief insight into the personality of a dozen fellow passengers, but spends more time describing her problems gasping for a cigarette - hasn't she heard of nicotine patches? In 8 lines (lines, not pages) she dismisses the whole journey from Portland Oregon to Sacramento to Denver to Albuquerque - and she doesn't even mention Nevada & Utah. Was she asleep the whole time? Then Arizona to New York via New Orleans vanishes in a dozen pages with 2 anecdotes. Was she bored? I'm surprised this won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award? I love travelling around America, but anyone could make it more exciting than this.
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