 | | |
| Roads : Driving America's Great Highways | 
 enlarge | Author: Larry Mcmurtry
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $0.01
You Save: $24.99 (100%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  (45 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1107294
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0684868849
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.304929
EAN: 9780684868844
ASIN: 0684868849
Publication Date: July 10, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
I wanted to drive the American roads at the century's end, to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach.... "From earliest boyhood the American road has been part of my life -- central to it, I would even say. The ranch house in which I spent my first seven years sits only a mile from highway 281, the long road that traverses the central plains, all the way from Manitoba to the Mexican border at McAllen, Texas. In winter I could hear the trucks crawling up 281 as I went to sleep. In summer I would sit on the front porch with my parents and grandparents, watching the lights of cars as they traveled up and down that road. We were thoroughly landlocked. I had no river to float on, to wonder about. Highway 281 was my river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book. "Other than curiosity, there's no particular reason for these travels -- just the old desire to be on the move. My destination is also my route, my motive only an interest in having the nomad in me survive a little longer. I'm not attempting to take the national pulse, or even my own pulse. I doubt that I will be having folksy conversations with people I meet as I travel. Today, in fact, I drove 770 miles, from Duluth, Minnesota, to Wichita, Kansas, speaking only about twenty words: a thank-you at a Quik Stop south of Duluth, where I bought orange juice and doughnuts; a lunch order in Bethany, Missouri; and a request for a room once I got to Wichita.... "I intend to travel mainly on the great roads, the interstates: my routes will be the 10, the 40, the 70, 80, and 90; or if I'm in the mood to go north-south, I will mostly use the 5, the 25, 35, 75. The 95 I intend to ignore. I will, from time to time, switch off the interstates onto smaller roads, but only if they provide useful connectives, or take me to interesting places that the great roads -- whose aim is to move you, not educate you -- don't yet go.... "Three passions have dominated my more than sixty years of mostly happy life: books, women, and the road. As age approaches, the appetite for long drives may leave me, which is why I want to get rolling now.... "The challenge of the solitary traveler is always the same: to find something out there that the reader will enjoy knowing about, or, at least, that the reader can be persuaded to read about. Usually, if there is no one but themselves in the narrative, the great travel writers rely on the extremes to which the environment forces them to produce the interest: Antarctica, and the failure of Scott to beat it, in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World or Arabia's Empty Quarter and the ability of the Bedouin to just beat it, in Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands. "I don't think I'm likely to encounter anything so extreme as the snows of Antarctica or the dunes of Arabia along the American interstates. At least I hope not. But I want to drive them anyway...just to see what I see. I merely want to write about the roads as I find them, starting in January of 1999, in Duluth, Minnesota, at the north end of the long and lonesome 35." -- LARRY McMURTRY
Amazon.com Review
You couldn't find a blunter or more accurate title for Larry McMurtry's third work of nonfiction. Roads is indeed an automotive odyssey, in which the author traverses America on one highway after another. As such, the book has a long and honorable pedigree, stretching back to Tocqueville by way of Kerouac, and many readers will compare it to William Least Heat-Moon's bucolic ramble, Blue Highways. That, however, would be a mistake. The last thing McMurtry has in mind is a leisurely tour of small-town America--he's interested in the interstates themselves, "the great roads, the major migration routes that carry Americans long distances quickly." No wonder the speedometer seldom dips below 65 mph throughout the entire narrative. McMurtry is a man on the move, and even his meditative moments fly by in the linguistic equivalent of fourth gear. Actually, there may be another reason the author is reluctant to apply the brakes: his distaste for various towns, villages, counties, and entire states. Planning a trip to the Texas hill country? McMurtry notes that "the soil is too stoney to farm or ranch, the hills are just sort of forested speed bumps, and the people, mostly of stern Teutonic stock, are suspicious, tightfisted, unfriendly, and mean." Missouri is "a place to get through as rapidly as possible," Ohio and Georgia "really aren't pleasant," and woe to the traveler who lingers in the one-horse towns of the West, "where it's not even wise to roll down one's windows--if you avoid getting murdered you might still breathe in some deadly desert germ." This crankiness does have an undeniable comic appeal. Yet Roads turns out to be a sentimental journey after all, in the course of which McMurtry hopes to resurrect some of the elan vital he lost in the wake of his 1991 heart surgery. Driving, like reading itself, just may prompt some remembrance of things past: As I prepared to drive those same overfamiliar roads again it occurred to me that my effort was obliquely Proustian, a retracing of my past that is analogous to the many rereadings I've done in the last few years, always of books I read before the surgery. In these rereadings and redrivings I'm searching, not for lost time, but for lost feelings, for the elements of my old personality that are still unaccounted for. I'm not anguished about these absentees, just curious and somewhat wistful. Indeed, anguish is largely absent from McMurtry's account, and he doesn't dwell often on this scenario of loss and recovery. Still, it comes through particularly strongly at the end, when he compares his own, transient experience of place to his father's. These final chapters cast a sadder and more substantial light on the preceding ones--and make this circuitous, sometimes tetchy book a trip worth taking. --James Marcus
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 A Book Rich with Reflection and Introspection January 2, 2008
This book is rich with personal reflection and introspection, as well as valuable insights about the roads travelled and its various destinations and passing points. McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove and other novels, recounts his travels on a number of roads that criss-cross the country in various ways. He gives us the ups and downs of the roads, and let's us in on what they have meant for him during his prolific life as a novelist and screenwriter. There is much personal revelation about his childhood and his father, and a lot of reflection and insight about the peoples and places covered by his travels. He is brutally honest in his views on peoples and places he does not like, which, for me, was unexpected but somewhat refreshing in that other travel books can sugar coat local character and place deficiencies. There are travel books written by individuals in search of adventure, or the unique, or the interesting angle. McMurtry's book takes another route, and brings his writer's/novelist's perceptions into play for the benenfit of the reader. Here and there the book takes the tone of a protracted traffic report, or the grumblings of a grumpy, frustrated driver, but overall the book is a literary work, worthy of more than a test drive.
Enjoyable, quick overview of US Interstates March 23, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
McMurtry provides a good macro level take on various US Interstates. If you're looking for minute details of each route, this book is not for you. But if a brief synopsis of what the whole highway system and the literature particular to each region mean to him sounds like an intriguing topic, I encourage you to check it out.
His observations for the handful of roads with which I am familiar, were spot on, particularly I-35. This gave the rest of his reports instant credibility and allowed me to trust with increased confidence his opinions. I really liked his analogy of the interstate system to rivers (he refers to the beginnings of roads as headwaters and talks about highways' merging like the juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers).
Furtherly enjoyable were his notes on various other writers. As a novice literature enthusiast, his recommendations and anecdotes were very helpful; although, perhaps to a more grizzled book veteran, this wouldn't be nearly as beneficial. Overall, I enjoyed this quick read.
 Best of Its Genre March 29, 2006
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I came to this book with perhaps an unusual background in that I'd not read much, if any, of McMurtry's fiction (although like most filmgoers I'd seen a lot of his overall product). On the other hand, I have read much of the American "on the road" travel literature from Steinbeck to Theroux to Least Heat Moon to Bryson, but I didn't enjoy any of them as much as Larry McMurtry's present book and it's difficult for me to explain why.
It's not simply that the author avoids autobiography and philosophizing, because he does not. When McMurtry goes off on these tangents, however, it's always in measured portions and is never tedious or preachy. He visits with people on the road but, again, doesn't overdo it by attempting to make icons or archetypes out of the ordinary. These sidebars always seem to help support the ongoing narrative and are almost always informative. What McMurtry really does best of all though is to recreate the feel of an Interstate Highway journey. For someone (like myself) who treasures these kind of journeys, there is a cinematic pleasure in reading his writing, which is present whether McMurtry is describing a road I've already traveled or one I may never see. This is actually the sort of text that a lot of photographs might detract from.
As I said, it's really very tough to explain exactly what is so pleasurable about reading this book (actually, I listened to an Audible.com reading and then bought the paperback for reference afterwards) other than to say it's very much like being on the road on a cloudless spring day in the open country, in no hurry to get where you're going, and being happy just to pick up what the author gives along the way. For me that's more than enough to warrant the highest recommendation.
 How boring March 15, 2006
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
'Nuff said. Dense, uninteresting, and a work of complete vanity. I wish I could get away with writing a few hundred pages of blither at the end of a road trip probably on someone else's dime.
Paging through a road atlas is much more exciting.
Interesting insights and observations September 12, 2005
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
Briefly, I thought the book provided the reader an interesting and fresh perspective on American locales and culture. I found it a valuable alternative to Blue Highways styled narratives - not deriding them - just commenting on the welcome change. Additionally, I found some of his literary references helpful.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| | |