Description:
With vigor and purpose, British-born Lesley Hazleton hits the American road as "a rite of passage," journeying cross-country from her home in Seattle to the Detroit auto show. Along the way, she visits the speed runs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, rumbles across the Sierras on the Rubicon Trail, takes her turn on the Saturn assembly line, and discovers the place where James Dean died in his Porsche. Through her journey, "a kind of Automotive geography of America," the allure of the automobile emerges--how it is entwined with the country and, importantly, her life. Hazleton is transfixed by the essence of the road and its machine, and her ability to place readers beside her in the passenger seat is provocative. When her father dies in faraway England, we become her confidant as she turns to contemplate her own grief and loss. "Journeys have a way of creating their own momentum," she writes. And although these departures from the strictly automotive theme may seem at first a distraction, they are very much a part of the larger journey of self-discovery that the American road has often held for many who have traveled and written about it. The insights she brings to characters, scenes, and sketches elsewhere become all the more meaningful. We see that, indeed, this romantic machine, the automobile, has a darker side. Just three hours from returning home, there is a wonderfully distracting radio program, an icy road, a sudden skid... Hazleton's journey dares to veer from the well-platted grid of first intentions into the back roads of the soul. A journey well worth taking. --Byron Ricks
| 
