Word: moon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps calamity provides the only incentive for such a journey. In the space of a single day, William Least Heat Moon (William Trogden) lost his job as a college English teacher and found out that his wife--from whom he was separated--had a new boyfriend. That was calamity enough for him, so he peaked up his old van with a small cache of supplies and the modest remains of his savings account, and rolled out of his Columbia, Mo., home in search of the forgotten land. Life's desperate moments are terrifying but also exhilarating, for they open...
TRAVELOGUES are as old as literature itself, but Blue Highways is more than anything an American work. A feat like Least Heat Moon's would be almost inconceivable anywhere else--to travel thousands and thousands of miles, from Nameless, Tenn., to Dime Box, Tex., to Bagley., Mon., to Cape Porpoise. Maine, and never pass outside the U.S. border, except for a small stretch of southern Canada. The faces of small-town America are as varied as their climates and geographies, from the Creoles of Louisiana to the Navajos of Nevada to the Yankees of Vermont. Yet if Blue Highways shows...
Least Heat Moon, whose name pays homage to his partly Indian ancestry, does not attempt to romanticize small-town life. Where he sees ignorance and hypocrisy he points it out and some traditions are not all good; as James Walker, a Black in Selma, Ala., tells him. "Ain't nothing changed." Nevertheless, throughout the book, we sense that small-town America, the way it was once known, is suffering its last gasp. Beyond each tree-lined ridge, across each mountain river, it seems, a dreaded red highway--an interstate carrying carloads of sightseers from New York and Ohio --stretches...
Least Heat Moon supplements his ample conversations with inhabitants of the various towns with the generous amounts of history he has culled from local libraries. The people he talks to, though usually reserved at first in the presence of a stranger, are almost uniformly generous with their time. We have come to think of our country as a dangerous place. Ironically, Least Heat Moon writes toward the end of his travels, "I'd traveled 10,000 miles and not encountered a single hoodlum. But I'd been taken for one several times." The observation at once seems to reflect Americans...
Least Heat Moon writes so well it is difficult to believe that this is his first book. His accounts are fast-paced, his descriptions clear and precise, his inevitable dips into philosophical analysis on the nature of travel well-spaced and not cumbersome. The book is a joy to read: like all good travel books it affords us the luxury of adventure without ever leaving our chair to retrace those miles...