The story:
William Least Heat-Moon drove the back roads of America in a beat up old van in the early 1980's after the breakup of his marriage and the loss of his job as a professor. He decided he needed to find something that was missing while it was still there to be found and the result was his classic travel novel Blue Highways. He strictly avoids the major roads and big cities as he tours 38 states and travels roughly 13,000 miles. Setting out from his home in Missouri he ventures alone to places as obscure as Nameless, TN, Globe, AZ, Fort Stockton, TX and Brooklyn Bridge, KY on his round the country trip winding up back where he started.
Once in the small and the forgotten places he finds on the map (the book is named for the blue highways that are the small state and county roads on his map) it may be an out of the way diner or café, a little college community, even a monastery, he retells histories and tales that make these places significant in their own way. Best about the book is the author's way of talking so easily to the people he encounters and getting them to reveal the intimacies and nuances of their lives. While at times the book can be very serious in dealing with social issues, overall the book has a less than serious air about itself due to the continual rating and critiquing of the restaurants he frequents throughout. A nice book that only twenty years after it's writing seems to capture a country decades more removed from today.

About the author:
He created his pen name by a quote that his father had once said, "I call myself heat moon, your elder brother is little heat moon. You, coming last, therefore you are least." Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri-Columbia where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity and received a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D degrees in English as well as a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. He also served as a professor of English at the University.
He is a contemporary Missouri travel writer, and author of a bestselling trilogy of topographical U.S. travel writing.
Blue Highways, a cult classic, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Heat-Moon took throughout the United States in 1978, after losing his teaching job and being left by his wife. He travelled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue) and tried to avoid cities, living out of the back of his van "Ghost Dancing" and visiting small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee, Hachita, New Mexico, and Bagley, Minnesota in an attempt to find places in America that were untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways. The book chronicles the people he talked to in roadside cafés as well as his personal soul-searching.
PrairyErth is a deep map account of Chase County, Kansas, and River Horse is an account of a four-month coast-to-coast boat trip across the U.S., using only the nation's waterways, and explores Heat-Moon's continuing observation of American culture. River Horse details Heat-Moon's retracing of Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American frontier in a nation at the end of the Twentieth century and only a short time from the rude awaking of September 11th. The reader can sense the same internal search through River Horse that the writer began with Blue Highways;for an America stripped of the commercial fog and tabloid mentality that often masks the great strengths of her people.
Besides the trilogy, he also wrote Columbus in the Americas, a brief historical book about Christopher Columbus.


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Buchdaten:
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by W. Least Heat Moon
Sprache: Englisch
Taschenbuch: 448 Seiten Verlag: Little, Brown & Company (November 1999)
ISBN: 0316353299
Preis: € 12,97



More works from the same author:

hier online bestellen River-Horse: Across America by Boat