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Roads : Driving America's Great Highways
Roads Driving America's Great Highways
Author: Larry McMurtry
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 tr...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780684868844
ISBN-10: 0684868849
Publication Date: 7/10/2000
Pages: 208
Rating:
  • Currently 2.9/5 Stars.
 9

2.9 stars, based on 9 ratings
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

reviewed Roads : Driving America's Great Highways on + 64 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 5
If you like McMurtry's fiction, and want to know about McMurtry the person, read this book. If you instead love travel, and travel tales, recognize that this in not a travel book. It's value is in getting a bit deeper into McMurtry's soul and in the snippits of info he shares about the authors who have lived in the areas through which he travels.

Boy, I wanted to like this book! I like McMurtry's work a lot, and I love travel - but I'm left wondering what the real motivation was for this book. It reads like something a bored old man would engage in when trying to recapture some positive experiences of the past, but discovering that what comes to the surface is not the good stuff but all of the repressed negative memories.

He begins by telling us that he doesn't want to re-do the already done slow backroad crawl of America's soul, so he'll confine himself to fast but interesting shots down our nation's interstates (an early clue to a task undoable!). He ends by telling us that his venture has been enlightening to the point of revealing that the paradise of American roads is not an interstate at all (what a surprise!), but a long two laner through the high plains of northern Montana. At this point, any lesser author would have been told by his publisher to go back and rewrite this - something McMurtry should have done at his own volition.
Pilly avatar reviewed Roads : Driving America's Great Highways on + 7 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Non-fiction. Very well written small pieces about the author driving in America. Makes you want to get in your car and just drive from state to state.
Read All 4 Book Reviews of "Roads Driving Americas Great Highways"


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