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Summary: Blue Highways is the last roadmap you'll ever need
Review: I ended up buying 17 copies of Blue Highways before I finally got all the way to the end of it, because I kept giving the one I was reading to friends that I knew would enjoy it as much as I did. Each year since, re-reading Blue Highways melts away the hibernation chill of winter by rekindled the fire of wanderlust and the need to eat some "ho-made pie" at a four-calendar cafe. My own "blue highway" pinacle was a memorable lunch with my college roommate during a two-lane cross-country trip where we found ourselves in a booth in a diner named Grandma's where the menu was what Grandma told us she had cooked for the day and we knew we had hit blue highway heaven when she scolded my friend, smacked his hand with a big wooden spoon and told him he couldn't have both potatoes and macaroni and cheese, that he had to eat a vegetable or she wouldn't let him have any pie for dessert. I caught her winking at the trucker at the counter, and he said that even though he hated vegetables himself, he had eaten them there every day for 20 years because Grandma's pies were worth it. He was right. Here's how Blue Highways reveals the secret to eating well on the road: "There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a cafe. No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop. One Calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey. Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present. Three calendars: Can't miss on the farm-boy breakfasts. Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too. Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they'll franchise. One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I've never seen a seven-calendar place. But old-time travelers - road men in a day when cars had running boards and lunchroom windows said AIR COOLED in blue letters with icicles dripping from the tops - those travelers have told me the golden legends of seven-calendar cafes." No maps are needed to travel Blue Highways. Just make sure you eat your veggies and don't make Grandma smack you with that big wooden spoon of hers and enjoy your pie.
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Summary: Book gives a beautiful look at the people of America.
Review: Take this book on your next long road trip. One of my college professors suggested it and I finally got around to it. I laughed. I thought about and I felt justice and injustice, ancestry and isolation, tolerance and intolerance, naive and wise. You know you have a great book when you share it with others and that's what I did with this book. I felt a connection with the rest of America in our search for the answers to the troubles of our hearts, lives, and communities.
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Summary: This book is a pure, spiritual slice of Americana
Review: Meaningful, and filled with metaphor, this book is a poignant look at a man standing outside of himself and coping with memory. Each person he writes about on his journey is made to stand out whether good, evil or indifferent. His love and respect for history is obvious--whether it be about the Pony Express (orphans preferred) or how Wolf Point, Montana got its name. He writes with a wry sense of humor, and with out any heavy hand. I've reread passages of this book for over a decade, and for me sums up what the true essence of being "on the road" is about. It is a journal as powerful as a Ken Burns documentary
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Summary: Simply fantasically beautiful.
Review: I hated to turn to the last page. I have since dreamed of following his footsteps. One of the best books I've ever read.
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Summary: I want to take a trip on the blue highways
Review: My husband always wants to arrive fast so we always take the super highways. I felt like there was someone else out there who is bored with the super highways. I appreciated what the author discovered along the way. Not everyone thought there was a new south. I enjoyed his experience in the backwoods area of Tennesee. Progress was coming even if they didn't want it. I especially loved the author's descriptive phrases-his crowning glory. He compared driving his car on super highways liked being powered by gerbils in an exercise wheel. If you are interested in reading some anecdotes about everyday people, you'll enjoy this book.
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Summary: an interesting book for foreigners to read about America
Review: Four of us were sitting around one night trying to come up with THE America book to take to a Chinese friend when I go to Beijing. Mark Twain (ugh) was ruled out as too difficult; F Scott Fitzgerald was discarded as showing a fairly sick side of the USA. We ended up with this book and Catcher in the Rye and something by Willa Cather, What do you think?
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Summary: A book I've kept nearby for 15 years
Review: This book is a treasure, if you love prose and are interested in people and places. I have kept a copy nearby (bedside table, car) for 15 years and often open it to any page and begin reading when I want to center my thoughts, or lower my blood pressure. There are few journalists who can observe, report and write as well as Heat-Moon. The book is a lesson about seeing and hearing the world; the world out there, and the one inside one's head.
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Summary: A permanent addition to the personal library
Review: William Least-Heat Moon, in an extraordinary first published book, reveals a journey taken far away from the "interstates" of the human experience. In the near-forgotten places and continental corners he passes through, life manages to persist in ways that it does not in the change-racked "fast lane" so many of us are swept into. Nearly two decades have passed and the book is no less relevant in what it says about modernity: In the chain-store franchise 90s, places increasingly appear like every other place, and local color and richness fades--or is bulldozed--into history. Artistically, BLUE HIGHWAYS is a feast. Least-Heat Moon's poetic descriptions of landscape and mindscape are equalled only by his marvelous ability to capture the varied dialects of America. When reading some of the language aloud, I actually succeeded in sounding like a Texan or coast fisherman . . . much more so than if I had ever made the attempt on my own. Like any good travelogue, BLUE HIGHWAYS endures, not only for the above reasons, but also for the honest look the author takes at himself and where his life is going--universal questions. And though there are no universal answers, I think this journey deserves the large audience that has embraced it and, by so doing, perhaps have asked themselves the same questions.
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Summary: This is a great book about people and place.
Review: Heat Moon lost his wife and his job, and his reaction was to go for a drive around America. His intent was not to search for meaning in time of personal crisis but to see what was out there. Blue Highways is his document of his three month journey. Writing in clear and powerful prose, Heat Moon has managed to present the individual character of the varied regions of the United States, as well as the personalities of the men and women he encountered. Through them, and sometimes through their interactions with their environment, he shows an imbalance between being modern and being human. I've read this book three times, and I am set to read it again. The power of the prose to reveal character brings me back to it time after time. I've always been struck by the author's ability to get so many strangers to tell him their hopes and dreams. This is an engaging and a great book.
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Summary: One of the most enjoyable works that I have looked at.
Review: I really enjoyed the writings by William Least-Heat Moon. I only wish that there were more books like this out there, if anyone knows of any, let me know!!
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