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Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: (I won't reiterate the contents of the book -- read other reviews for a synopsis.)After reading Bryson, Thoreux, Horowitz, excellent travel writers all, I must admit I don't get the hullaballo about Blue Highways. The prose is thick, the metaphors gooey and strained, and many of the 'conversations' the author had with strangers are patently fake (all travel writers take minor liberties when quoting conversations, but the book is full of extended, half-page soliloquies from people from all over the country who all seem to be local history experts and somehow manage to speak in the same folksy tone no matter where they're from). In addition, though the author traveled through a number of small towns, his tour was essentially a whirlwind drive around the edges of the United States, and I was left with a sense that much was missed. I realize that the book is meant more to be a 'spiritual journey' than a travel movel, but there's little growth shown by the author during his travels, and the book is pervaded by a sense of brooding melancholy which isn't really resolved at the end. Perhaps there wasn't much like this book available in 1982 -- I suspect timing had more to do with the book's success than inherent quality. It's not BAD; it's just not up to the hype. Worth reading if your to-read list is short, but borrow from a friend.
Rating: 
Summary: Blue Highways . . . a Blue Print
Review: BLUE HIGHWAYS . . . These are the 1st words of the book. And they are granted one whole page. "On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk - times neither day nor night - the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and that's the time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself." I bought BH as quickly as I could after having read its review in NYT Book Review back in 1982. I bought a cofee, sat in a plush chair, cracked the binding and opened the book to this page. I read these words. I stopped, but my eyes remained fixed. I read these words again. Again. And, again. I could not turn the page. Suddenly, I was back in the early 60's when I was an engineering student with an Austin Healy. I remembered sitting at the top of a hill somewhere in the country just as the night's darkness was forced aside by the morning's early light. I read the opening paragraph again. Again. And, again. I could not turn the page. That was all I could read. It took years before I could read the book. I attempted to explain this experience to my friends but received little more than a supportive and patronizing smile. I bought copies of BH for a half-dozen friends and asked them to read the book and tell me what happened to them. Only one guy, a bother under the skin, seemed to 'understand.' I have read BH since . . . at least a half-dozen times. It pulls me back still like a . . . well, a Blue Highway. If the words in the 1st paragraph make your eyes grow glassy, silence your world, and stir your heart then buy Blue Highways. If the words didn't, then, uh . . ..
Rating:
Summary: Nostalgia for what?
Review: I didn't read the whole book when it first came out (some passages were familiar from, I think, Atlantic Monthly) which was 1982. I picked it up recently and got hooked by the magical prose. This man can write. I turned down pages and marked passages at first but then it became all turned down pages and marked passages. It describes a jouney around the United States, sticking to back roads and small towns. He emphasizes his native American Osage heritage and the has an anti-materialist philosophy full of yearning for older simpler times. Sometimes his antipathy to people who commit the crimes of being middle-aged or well-dressed or living in new houses seems overdone.(I wear a necktie myself sometimes and live in a New York suburb). He likes people to be old and poor and deeprooted in their environment, slightly eccentric, and passionately following some craft or traditional trade.
On the whole his nostalgia for the good old days of 20 years previously has worn quite well. It's odd to realize that the book itself is now 20 years old.
Rating:
Summary: A keeper
Review: I read this book 20 years ago and I still have the original copy that I read back then. I just loved this book. In fact, I did a similar trip to Moon's, on a much smaller scale, and I even named my van "Ghostdancing" after his. It is a fun book and one in which the reader feels privileged to get a peek inside his spiritual journey. It is deeper than it first appears. I was touched by it.
Rating:
Summary: A keeper
Review: I read this book 20 years ago and I still have the original copy that I read back then. I just loved this book. In fact, I did a similar trip to Moon's, on a much smaller scale, and I even named my van "Ghostdancing" after his. It is a fun book and one in which the reader feels privileged to get a peek inside his spiritual journey. It is deeper than it first appears. I was touched by it.
Rating: 
Summary: This is ABSOLUTELY the WORST book I have EVER read!!!
Review: In William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, he tells his personal experience of his travels across the country. He feels his life is turned upside down and he needs to escape it. Taking his van, Ghost Dancing, for the ride, he has the adventure of a lifetime. He comes to points in his journey where life is more exciting than others, and places where the wind never blows. Overall, he meets several people on his way across the country and stays in several towns. He learns the variety of ways god is believed in, the history of flying, and the way that's several of the towns he visits was started. If you like to read about other peoples travels, than I suggest this book to you. It will be hard to find at a local library, but it can be found. The author goes into detail on several different points and is very organized. He tells the story just as it seemed to happen and doesn't confuse the reader one bit. This story is very educational and leaves the reader with the want to travel the country, as did the author of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Blue Highways
Review: In William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, he tells his personal experience of his travels across the country. He feels his life is turned upside down and he needs to escape it. Taking his van, Ghost Dancing, for the ride, he has the adventure of a lifetime. He comes to points in his journey where life is more exciting than others, and places where the wind never blows. Overall, he meets several people on his way across the country and stays in several towns. He learns the variety of ways god is believed in, the history of flying, and the way that's several of the towns he visits was started. If you like to read about other peoples travels, than I suggest this book to you. It will be hard to find at a local library, but it can be found. The author goes into detail on several different points and is very organized. He tells the story just as it seemed to happen and doesn't confuse the reader one bit. This story is very educational and leaves the reader with the want to travel the country, as did the author of this book.
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: 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: A sloooow drive across the USA
Review: William Least Heat-Moon takes his wonderful prose on a slow trip across the back roads of America, and along the way we get to meet folks in small-town America. Heat-Moon's journey was precipitated by the double whammy of learning he'd lost both his job and his wife at just about the same time, and he figured, as he felt he'd also lost a sense of direction for his life, that perhaps travel, reflection, and writing might cure what ailed him.
Some have said the book, now almost 30 years old, is dated - and of course it is. But what makes it even more interesting nowadays is, reading it, you can kind of track the process of how America got from what it was then to what it is now. It's a bit scary.
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