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Rating: 
Summary: An Entertaining Trip
Review: An excellent read for an American male who grew up on 50's cars. I'm a gen x'er and found it harder to identify, but it still held my interest. He has an enjoyable style that's witty without being pretentious.Morgan takes us through his dream assignment of driving a new Porsche Boxter across the country and through the hard-wired American desire to be seen in a 'cool' car. He describes the very 20th century mode of viewing our personal history through the cars we own. "Back in high school I drove a 73' Mercury Capri and was dating.........." I don't know if this is true for others, but I connect chunks of my life with the car I was driving just as he does. There were the Audi years, and college days driving a Honda, etc. Morgan has a great take on the SUVism that Americans have embraced: "once upon a time the car was going to take us to our cabin in the woods, now it's become the cabin." It seems we Americans are always seeking a new frontier, and maybe getting in the car and just driving is the modern equivalent of the Lewis and Clark ambition in each of us that he speaks to. Morgan asks where we go when the frontier is closed, as was declared over 100 years ago. He poetically details the rush of the open road, and warns "a lot can go wrong in the distance to the moon." He covers a lots of geographical ground from coast to coast, and has quick insights here and there. In the end, I felt there was more he could have done with the concept, but still enjoyed the book.
Rating:
Summary: A Dispiriting Drive through a Male Midlife Crisis
Review: Ever wonder what's going through the minds of those fat balding dentists you always see driving expensive sports cars? Well now you can find out. The author's highly contrived trip gives him an opportunity to display lots of mildly interesting details garnered during library research into the history of cars in America. Unfortunately, this material competes for space with far too many pages of nostalgic rumination about the author's teenage years, his first marriage, and his current problems with wife number two. He drives across the US obsessing about his middle aged body, drinking too much, eating junk, and reporting with glee anytime a hot babe responds with interest to his "pussy machine" (his words, not mine.) This strikes me as yet another book crafted by an agent and the publisher's marketing department with an eye to TV appearances and tie-ins rather than the serious literary "road story" it purports to be. It's real theme is the whining of priviledged white middle aged men who, though they got a big piece of it, didn't get it all. It bears the same relationship to "On the Road" that a Big Mac does to the meatloaf blue plate special at Stella's Roadside Dinner.
Rating: 
Summary: A Roadtrip into Middle-Aged Hornliness
Review: Here's the life lesson this book confirmed: if you're going to share a long road trip with a companion and a car, best select both carefully. The Porsche Boxster featured in this book is obviously a primo vehicle for the journey. Alas, James Morgan is not the companion of choice, and this book -- whose premise of a Interstate journey from Miami to Portland atttracted me to it -- lost a star about every fifty pages. Ruminating on whether Americans as a people (and we are basically talking men here -- women exist mostly as ornaments impressed by cars) long most for the open road or the comforts of home, Morgan tells car stories, but not enough of them or particularly interesting ones. He worries about the designs of people he meets along the way and how much he spends on the motels where he stays. Earrings, scruffy beards, long straggly hair on those he meets seem to evoke in him images of horrors about to be inflicted on his person, although these folk invariably offer him kindness both small and large. Frequent flashbacks to his adolescence -- wink, wink -- hint strongly at the seductive qualities of cars he owned in his early driving years. He quarrels with his wife before embarking from Miami and too many pages are spent alluding to this quarrel (details of which are never shared) and the in-trip visit and numerous telephone calls that only seem to exacerbate it. On the evidence of this book, Morgan's trip brought more bother than pleasures or answers, and he writes of it with prose that is neither original or engrossing. My advice: don't subject yourself to his angst. Instead, take a fast car out for an open road run.
Rating: 
Summary: Fussing and Fretting Across the USA
Review: Here's the life lesson this book confirmed: if you're going to share a long road trip with a companion and a car, best select both carefully. The Porsche Boxster featured in this book is obviously a primo vehicle for the journey. Alas, James Morgan is not the companion of choice, and this book -- whose premise of a Interstate journey from Miami to Portland atttracted me to it -- lost a star about every fifty pages. Ruminating on whether Americans as a people (and we are basically talking men here -- women exist mostly as ornaments impressed by cars) long most for the open road or the comforts of home, Morgan tells car stories, but not enough of them or particularly interesting ones. He worries about the designs of people he meets along the way and how much he spends on the motels where he stays. Earrings, scruffy beards, long straggly hair on those he meets seem to evoke in him images of horrors about to be inflicted on his person, although these folk invariably offer him kindness both small and large. Frequent flashbacks to his adolescence -- wink, wink -- hint strongly at the seductive qualities of cars he owned in his early driving years. He quarrels with his wife before embarking from Miami and too many pages are spent alluding to this quarrel (details of which are never shared) and the in-trip visit and numerous telephone calls that only seem to exacerbate it. On the evidence of this book, Morgan's trip brought more bother than pleasures or answers, and he writes of it with prose that is neither original or engrossing. My advice: don't subject yourself to his angst. Instead, take a fast car out for an open road run.
Rating: 
Summary: A look at how life has changed in with cars
Review: I receieved this book as a Christmas gift from a fellow Porsche lover and read while I was heading home back home for the holidays. I am in my late 20's, so I have not reached my "mid-life crisis" yet, but I still enjoyed following the tales of Morgan and his thoughts about how the car has influenced our society. I enjoyed his talks while he was in Portland, Oregon. Hearing his own tales on how certain cars throughout his life played a major role in certain cross-roads kept me intrigued. I love Porsches, but I also love the idea of just hitting the road and seeing life outside my little world. As soon as I finished this book, I began "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. So far, I see some similarites.
Rating:
Summary: A look at how life has changed in with cars
Review: I receieved this book as a Christmas gift from a fellow Porsche lover and read while I was heading home back home for the holidays. I am in my late 20's, so I have not reached my "mid-life crisis" yet, but I still enjoyed following the tales of Morgan and his thoughts about how the car has influenced our society. I enjoyed his talks while he was in Portland, Oregon. Hearing his own tales on how certain cars throughout his life played a major role in certain cross-roads kept me intrigued. I love Porsches, but I also love the idea of just hitting the road and seeing life outside my little world. As soon as I finished this book, I began "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. So far, I see some similarites.
Rating:
Summary: A car buff shares his love of the Boxster
Review: James Morgan describes driving a Porsche Boxster from Miami to St. Louis to Portland to San Francisco. Morgan seems like the sort of person who experiences life as a series of car stories, and during the journey, he tells his life history with an emphasis on the automotive angle. The pivotal part of his road trip is in Portland, Oregon, which is famous for its anti-car, pro-transit policies that are known as the "new urbanism." Morgan attacks the new urbanists, and wonders why anyone would choose to stand on a windy rain-drenched street waiting for the bus when they could be driving their own car instead. It's particularly ironic when Portland planning specialists use contorted rationalizations to explain why they drive to work instead of taking the public transit that they're forcing down the throats of their fellow residents. Morgan writes well, if you don't mind the autobiographical element overpowering the travel narrative. However, he's a dyed-in-the-wool car buff writing for other car buffs. Unless you're the sort of person who loves talking about cars, you may have difficulty connecting with this author.
Rating:
Summary: Road to Nowhere
Review: James Morgan nailed the "Boxter Experience" on the head. As a Boxter owner, I found myself grinning with joy reading about Mr. Morgan's experiences driving this amazingly fun and evocative car. The Boxter really does elicit great reactions and car stories from total strangers you encounter on the road. The route he chose to drive, especially the Louis and Clark sections of the trip, was perfect. Also the choice of Portland Oregon as a stop was a very thought provoking exercise. I found the running tension throughout the entire trip between Mr. Morgan and his wife (who accompanied him only for the first few days of his odyssey) very disconcerting. In spite of that, if you own a sports car or dream of owning one, this is a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: the distance to the moon!
Review: The book was great! Well, mabey thats because im a total car buff.But yet the book was not totally based on cars or car facts,it was based on americas love of the automobile.I like the way it was written , and it included many nice car parts too!
Rating:
Summary: A Roadtrip into Middle-Aged Hornliness
Review: We've all seen this guy at a stoplight and cringed. Ballcap pulled down to conceal creeping baldness, wraparound sunglasses in place to allow maximum "leerage," arm propped self-consciously atop the steering wheel -- a reminder that adulthood for some is just a sad continuation of high school, a pathetic attempt to prove one's sexual desirability by dressing the part. The saddest aspect of this ego trip are those left behind, particularly the author's third(!) wife, who clearly recognizes (present tense) that she can't trust him around other women -- women he approaches throughout the text as "possible scores." Gross book.
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