Rating: 
Summary: Roads, roads, and more roads.
Review: Larry McMurtry's book Roads is perfectly titled. His book is a nine month adventure of the wonderful highways and byways of the United States. He takes us through almost the entire U.S. of A. All the while throwing in little interesting tid bits here and there. Each place he visits he knows of at least one famous author from the town. He has a vast knowledge of towns, perhaps because he has visited each one multiple times. However he does, his travels take you on a peaceful journey, for the most part, from town to town. He also takes the time to mention many of the museums you could visit if you followed the paths of Larry McMurtry, many of which sound intersting enough to pay a visit. The book has an overall good and peaceful feel to it. A man on his journey through the U.S. with nothing but his rental car, a TIME magazine, and the open road all equal to a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Roads, roads, and more roads.
Review: Larry McMurtry's book Roads is perfectly titled. His book is a nine month adventure of the wonderful highways and byways of the United States. He takes us through almost the entire U.S. of A. All the while throwing in little interesting tid bits here and there. Each place he visits he knows of at least one famous author from the town. He has a vast knowledge of towns, perhaps because he has visited each one multiple times. However he does, his travels take you on a peaceful journey, for the most part, from town to town. He also takes the time to mention many of the museums you could visit if you followed the paths of Larry McMurtry, many of which sound intersting enough to pay a visit. The book has an overall good and peaceful feel to it. A man on his journey through the U.S. with nothing but his rental car, a TIME magazine, and the open road all equal to a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: The farther you see the further you think....
Review: McMurty has proven once again that the west is what has inspired his writing... As I have learned growing up in New York (which of course I love) but moving to El Paso, Tx 20 years ago....when you are out west, the farther you see, the further you think.... A must read for anyone who feels cramped... Steve Yellen
Rating: 
Summary: Should have kept the car in the garage
Review: McMurty's book looked promising, as literary travel books of a personal nature usually have an interesting point of view. In this case McMurtry totally lost me with his aloofness and lack of any kind of insight. He travels huge distances on the interstate and other roads and appears to see nothing. He is so miserable and self-indulgent that he might as well have stayed at home and written the same book. Now Paul Theroux is as miserable as they come sometimes, but I devoured every word of his adventures. Not so here, Roads was a very disappointing read for me.
Rating:
Summary: This is the diary of a lonely man.
Review: Mr. McMurtry is a very introspective man, and American roads are intimately connected to his soul. In these roads he sees his past, which he contrasts with the present, sometimes drawing fabulous analogies. Our roads are the rivers of the past. But my overall impression of this formidable book, is that Mr. McMurtry is sad, and even though that might not have been his motivation in writing this book, his sadness comes across very strongly. It is a good book, despite several editorial errors that should have been caught by his legendary editor.
Rating: 
Summary: Road to Nowhere.
Review: Northern Michigan is the Maine of the midwest. Larry McMurtry prefers broad well-traveled roads to the blue lines favored by Annie Proulx and William Least Heat-Moon. McMurtry likes to cite earlier travel writers. The Pacific Northwest is determinedly downscale. Going to L.A. is enjoyable because of the confusion. Between Ontario and Barstow is Victorville, famous as the Home of the Western, site of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum. Route 40 is now essentially a truck road. A favorite place of the author's is Key Largo. He find Miami heavy work. He takes us to Hemingway's house in Key West. He does not like the furniture, it has a night club feel, and the library is improbable. Maybe the nondescript books were bought to fill out the shelves. The author had heart surgery in December, 1991, and it was a sort of death. Places for him now have a before and after feel to them by association to the chronological events of his life. In Washington McMurtry had been shocked by the desperate ambition of the social, the journalistic, elite. McMurtry is funny. The research triangle is home to the yuppie redneck. He calls the government workers inching their way home to Fairfax, Vienna, and Falls Church the ant people. For a brief time in his childhood the author experienced travel as a slow activity. He does not really care about the make or the model of the car, but he does love driving. McMurtry has looked at many places quickly, his father looked at one place deeply. Tour the USA with a Chevrolet is an advertising slogan from the past and a kind of unconscious command to consider a tour of the USA in the company of Larry McMurtry. In the course of such a tour you will learn or relearn points about geography and roads and, more importantly, points about book writers and booksellers of particular interest to anyone who reads deeply and widely. For example, Seattle is the reason to celebrate Raymond Carver and Theodore Roethke. Like the author's description of Clancy Sigal's GOING AWAY he gets the right amount of history and feeling on a single page.
Rating:
Summary: Traveler and antiquarian bookseller
Review: Northern Michigan is the Maine of the midwest. Larry McMurtry prefers broad well-traveled roads to the blue lines favored by Annie Proulx and William Least Heat-Moon. McMurtry likes to cite earlier travel writers. The Pacific Northwest is determinedly downscale. Going to L.A. is enjoyable because of the confusion. Between Ontario and Barstow is Victorville, famous as the Home of the Western, site of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum. Route 40 is now essentially a truck road. A favorite place of the author's is Key Largo. He find Miami heavy work. He takes us to Hemingway's house in Key West. He does not like the furniture, it has a night club feel, and the library is improbable. Maybe the nondescript books were bought to fill out the shelves. The author had heart surgery in December, 1991, and it was a sort of death. Places for him now have a before and after feel to them by association to the chronological events of his life. In Washington McMurtry had been shocked by the desperate ambition of the social, the journalistic, elite. McMurtry is funny. The research triangle is home to the yuppie redneck. He calls the government workers inching their way home to Fairfax, Vienna, and Falls Church the ant people. For a brief time in his childhood the author experienced travel as a slow activity. He does not really care about the make or the model of the car, but he does love driving. McMurtry has looked at many places quickly, his father looked at one place deeply. Tour the USA with a Chevrolet is an advertising slogan from the past and a kind of unconscious command to consider a tour of the USA in the company of Larry McMurtry. In the course of such a tour you will learn or relearn points about geography and roads and, more importantly, points about book writers and booksellers of particular interest to anyone who reads deeply and widely. For example, Seattle is the reason to celebrate Raymond Carver and Theodore Roethke. Like the author's description of Clancy Sigal's GOING AWAY he gets the right amount of history and feeling on a single page.
Rating:
Summary: Larry's Depressed
Review: Seems McMurtry, after producing some ponderous epics, like Lonesome Dove, has declined to penning quick, non-fiction little tomes to gin a few bucks for his wallet. Don't get me wrong, McMurtry is one of my favorite authors, but Driving America and his biography of Crazy Horse, just don't come up to his earlier standards. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen nearly slips into the catetory with Driving and Crazy, and only some frequent good passages helps McMurty keep his nose above the water line. Driving and Crazy Horse are thin soup for the price. I thought McMurty's Driving would be a great sequel to Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert. Not so. Paterniti drives a five-speed stick with 300 horsepower by comparision.
Rating:
Summary: Traveling with Larry McMurtry Can be a Pleasant Ride!
Review: So now we know we're traveling interstate highways and getting personal observations on whatever appears to strike the fancy of Larry McMurtry. Great! Why not listen? We have another opportunity to learn about this complex man of letters as we ride along with him and listen to his views on sights and scenes and absorb his accounts of past historic events in certain sections of the country's West and South. Enjoyable and interesting read. And since I've traveled many of these same highways I could happily recall their varied sights as I shared the ride.
Evelyn Horan - teacher/counselor/author
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl Books One - Three
Rating:
Summary: Not all highways are blue
Review: Some folks say the Interstate Highway System finally made it possible to travel from one coast of America to the other without seeing anything. But "Roads," Larry McMurtry's new collection of essays, part Jack Kerouac, part William Least Heat Moon, part travelogue, part memoir, offers a glimpse of places as remote as the human heart. This collection of essays is not as much about roads as restlessness. His routine is simple: McMurtry flies someplace, rents a car and drives home to lonesome Archer City, Texas. On his dawn-to-dusk superhighway sojourns, never slowing down for three-calendar diners, tourist traps or even to visit friends, he won't even turn on the radio. The journey itself is his destination. It's about going, not stopping. At a level as uncomplicated as a farm-to-market road, the highways of McMurtry's collection are merely threads binding together his diverse musings on Los Angeles, manifest destiny, Hemingway's furniture, the need for rattlesnakes, the callowness (and shallowness) of contemporary Hollywood, cowboys, young killers in the Heartland, old books, fatherhood, the yellow housepaint in Key Largo, great rivers, the Holy Tortilla, and short remembrances of several dead characters from his stories. His prose has the quality of conversation on a long, long drive: a meandering, intimate, unfettered discourse inspired by the passing landscape. But in a larger sense, "Roads" is a metaphor for the circular journey of McMurtry's life. It leads him to, from and through places where he considered roads not taken, or where his personal or literary paths crossed others, or simply where the quality of light through his windshield illuminated a memory. "Roads" can be read as a natural sequel to "Walter Benjamin": The boy who never read Hemingway or Faulkner until he went to college now takes to the open road as a man to ponder their legacies -- and his own.
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