Storyville, USA

Rating:
Summary: Amusing, warm, informative look at small town America.
Review: Dale Peterson hits the nail on the head in this neat little book, as he roams around small-town America. The many encounters with locals are funny, sometimes bittersweet evocations of an America that many of us thought lost years ago. A splendid work.

Rating:
Summary: Rates a C+ as a high school essay.
Review: I like "cute" but 300 pages of it? The author quaintly refers to his map as his "cartographicus magnus," not once, but for 300 pages. His high school text, "A Guide To Colorful Writing," was heavily used as evidenced by this typical sentence:
"After a major interlude of rest and relaxation in our very own home just north of Boston, after sunny days followed by damp and drizzly ones, after a wallow in middle-aged domesticity followed by a shallow impatience with it, after a dozen serious dog walks and a thousand gentle strokes on the canine cranium, at last we put down our collective foot and raised Storyville's second leg." The book was published by the University of Georgia Press. Why?

Rating:
Summary: Rates a C+ as a high school essay.
Review: I like "cute" but 300 pages of it? The author quaintly refers to his map as his "cartographicus magnus," not once, but for 300 pages. His high school text, "A Guide To Colorful Writing," was heavily used as evidenced by this typical sentence:
"After a major interlude of rest and relaxation in our very own home just north of Boston, after sunny days followed by damp and drizzly ones, after a wallow in middle-aged domesticity followed by a shallow impatience with it, after a dozen serious dog walks and a thousand gentle strokes on the canine cranium, at last we put down our collective foot and raised Storyville's second leg." The book was published by the University of Georgia Press. Why?

Rating:
Summary: Beauty In The Details
Review: In a time when all of the metropolitan areas all look pretty much the same, with all of the same chain stores giving malls that same kind of banality, this travelogue refreshes my memory of all of the quaint and inimitable places that I remember from my youthful wanderings. I found myself anxious to discover the origins of the picturesque locations and even when the search proved disappointing there were still the fascinating observations of the author and his "research crew." I wish I had found these sort of stories with my kids.

Rating:
Summary: Cute
Review: The author and his two young kids travel around the U.S., ostensibly looking for the stories behind towns with goofy names (which I'm a sucker for). Of course, it's much more than that - with the emphasis on small town America and its values and people. I wish there had been a little more on the family interaction. Also, the author's constant punning just about drove me crazy (minus one star for that, definitely). I particularly liked the "darker" moments in the book (they're not that dark), when the author runs into a funny-named town that's really not a small town, but what he calls a "Martian village" - i.e., the cookie-cutter strip of every suburb all over the country. Excellent descriptions of place - really got a feeling I was there.

Rating:
Summary: Cute
Review: The author and his two young kids travel around the U.S., ostensibly looking for the stories behind towns with goofy names (which I'm a sucker for). Of course, it's much more than that - with the emphasis on small town America and its values and people. I wish there had been a little more on the family interaction. Also, the author's constant punning just about drove me crazy (minus one star for that, definitely). I particularly liked the "darker" moments in the book (they're not that dark), when the author runs into a funny-named town that's really not a small town, but what he calls a "Martian village" - i.e., the cookie-cutter strip of every suburb all over the country. Excellent descriptions of place - really got a feeling I was there.

Rating:
Summary: A quirky and appealing account of backroads travel.
Review: What is Storyville? Whether you're in Toast, North Carolina, Monkeys Eyebrow, Kentucky, or Winner, South Dakota, a Storyville is a real town you can find on a map, with a tale behind its quirky name. Covering 20,000 miles of U.S. roads, Dale Peterson drove with his kids, Britt and Bayne, from Start, Lousiana, to Deadhorse, Alaska, in search of small-town America in the "garage sale of the open highway." Along the way they expolored open spaces, wild places, and country back roads and met people who weren't afraid to talk to one another.

Togethter they discover the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and zany stories behind nearly sixty small towns, guided by a AAA Road Atlas, expert storytellers and lots of curiosity. They dip into Caddo Lake and the everglades of Uncertain, Texas, go a little crazy in Loco, Oklahoma, and learn about bee colonies in Climax, New York. Conversations with town folk range from the refridgerator at the center of Noodle, Texas, and the hazards of Accident, Maryland, to issues of civil rights, religion, and environmental preservation. Collected here are the landscapes, landmarks, faces, thoughts, and conversations of a sentimental, idiosyncratic, and often hilarious American odyssey. Storyville, USA is a long winding trip into the back roads of the country and a longer one into the hinterland of our town hearts.

Dale Peterson is the author of several books including Chimpanzee Travels: On and off the Road in Africa; Deluge and the Ark; and Demonic Males. He is coauthor, with Jane Goodall, of Visions of Caliban. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.