William Least Heat-Moon

I wondered if I would find a 600+ page book about a single county in Kansas able to hold my interest. While it took me awhile to get through, reading only a chapter or two each day, the answer was an emphatic yes. The author so completely immerses you in a sense of the place he is exploring, it was impossible to stop reading it. On occasion, I skimmed through some of the "From the Commonplace Books" chapters of citations from other works about Kansas, but I never skipped through the author's own writings. Particularly recommended for fans of the travel genre.… (mehr)

A classic American road trip. Since author William Least Heat Moon is Osage, he’s about as classic American as you can get. In something of a funk over loss of his job and deterioration of his marital relationship, he packs a sleeping bag and some cooking equipment in his van and heads out, passing through Nameless, Tennessee; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Dime Box, Texas; Shelby, Montana; and miscellaneous other cities, towns, and villages. Least Heat Moon mostly stays on the fringes of the country; he covers the center in a later book, Prairy Earth.

He stops and talks everywhere, and people open up to him; and he does a lot of self-contemplation, thus making this as much an autobiography as a travel book; in fact there isn’t that much description of geography (although there’s quite a bit of history). This is an easy and rewarding read; recommended.… (mehr)

The author goes by the dignified name of William Least Heat-Moon, and the front cover of his book shows a tiny speck of a boat puttering serenely on a river that meanders through the green hills. I don’t think I can be entirely faulted for anticipating a read that was more sedate, less angry, and less cynical than this one turned out to be.

Some miscellaneous comments:

1) There’s no denying that the author is a very talented writer.
2) I got tired of his profanity pretty quickly.
3) The book’s dedication makes it sound like the copilot was a composite of seven different people. If so, they all had pretty much the same personality.
4) “The Photographer” is one of the main figures, but very few photographs of any worth made it into the book.
5) The author despises the partying frat boys he encounters along his way, but he and his friends sometimes act like superannuated frat boys themselves.
6) The author is angry about the environmental state of the country, and he’s not shy about sniping at those he feels are to blame. I doubt that he turned very many of his readers Green. I think he would have been more successful if he had either molded his anger into a cogent argument or had very clearly led by example. What was the environmental cost of his journey? How would he possibly have made this journey if engineers had left the wilderness alone? That last question is actually posed to him by someone he meets on his voyage. His response was weak, I thought.… (mehr)