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Rating: 
Summary: An excellant account of bare-boned travel in 1938 America.
Review: Mr. Hofvendahl is a masterful writer who describes an extended summer of his distant youth with a foot-on-the-pavement jolt adorned with powder blue images of a summer sky. The book conveys the fear and cold of a lonely road as well as the warmth of good-hearted people that he met during his travel. It is a grand sequel to his first book, Hard on the Wind, which told of his earlier adventure on a four-masted schooner on the Bering Sea off Alaska's coast.
Rating:
Summary: Best in its genre!
Review: Mr. Hofvendahl's reminiscences are the best I've read. Steinbeck traveled with Charley during the final years of the writer's life. Least Heat Moon took to the highways because of a mid-life crisis. Both works were less about the authors and more about observing the land and the people. Even Kerouac's time on the road was less a time of discovery than of social commentary. Not so with Hofvendahl. Here is a young man -- less than two decades into his life -- filled with a desire to experience new things in a pre-war era most of us never knew.Writing 50 years after the events took place, Hofvendahl's style is crisp. His ability (as an older adult) to convey the youthful enthusiasm of a teenager is wonderful. The work is an observation of people and places, but it is also an account of Hofvendahl's own coming of age. Taken from one of the era's songs of life on road, "A Land so Fair and Bright" is terrific. Think "Summer of 42" meets "Blue Highways" and you'll get the picture.
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