Rating: 
Summary: Preachy & Dull
Review: Overall the book is pretty dull. In order to liven up sections Heat=Moon tries to get us worried about whether or not he'll hit his timeline or even sink the boat. After a few of these exagerrated concerns are told the remaining ones are not at all believable. Every few pages he also likes to remind us how bad Americans are at keeping our environment spotless and wild. This coming from a man cruising the rivers in a twin engine boat, and on shallower parts even puts a motor on his canoe. This, also coming from a man who would not have gotten past New York if it wasn't for the Erie Canal. Preaching, during a book like this, is normal and expected. He just takes it over the top and by the end of the book I was rooting for another dam to be built. Finally, there are too many stories about himself and how he was feeling and not enough anecdotes about people he met along the way. It's those colorful stories that usually make travel books likes these interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Obstructions of his own making
Review: One of the seven Nikawa co-pilots William Least Heat-Moon lumped into the singular entity of "Pilotis" was a woman, New Jersey registered nurse Linda Barton. That one female among seven presented Heat-Moon -- or as I knew him at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, professor Bill Trogdon -- with a little problem: To keep to his plan to create a singular Pilotis from this seven-headed hydra, he could never refer to the character with gender-specific he-she pronouns lest he reveal on which segment of the cross-country river journey Barton accompanied him (although he did slip once by calling his Erie Canal companion a "squire"). The result was an entire thick volume full of some of the most awkward, forced sentence structure I've encountered since substitute teaching sixth-graders at Orchard Farm Middle School, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Bad or inexperienced writers paint themselves into such untenable corners. The Bill Trogdon I knew from the wonderfully flowing "Blue Highways" should have been better than this. What possible reason did he have for this incredibly clumsy device which he created and then had to nurse Boone-County-Ham-handedly through all those pages? It wasn't the co-pilots' privacy, for he names them all in a foreword. Was his resulting self-aggrandizing focus on himself at the expense of his fellow travelers devised so that readers who loved him from his past work would end up despising him as much as he despised himself? The Bill Trogdon I knew in the '80s was not a pedantic boor. His quest was to gather insight with every mile and then share it with us, not to excruciatingly pound us with what he already knew before he rounded the next bend. I longed to travel every blue-highway mile with him in Ghost Dancing. The 20-years-older Trogdon aboard Nikawa seemed more Ted Baxter than Mark Twain, and I wouldn't want to travel around the block with him. What a pity. What a waste.
| 
