Heistheauthorof a bestselling trilogy of topographical U. S. travel writing. Blue Highways, which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1982–83, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Least Heat Moon took throughout the United States in 1978 after losing his teaching job and separating from his first wife. Experts categorize this book as “travel literature”. It is a travel book, for William traveled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue, especially in the old-style Rand McNally road atlas) and tried to avoid cities.
Living out of the back of his van which has been named “Ghost Dancing”, he visited small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee; Hachita, New Mexico; and Bagley, Minnesota to find places in America untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways. The book records encounters in roadside cafes as well as his search for something greater than himself. He describes places, converses with people, learns or reviews history. As may be expected, the places are common and strange, mundane and magical.
Some are pleasing and peaceful; others evoke indignance in William, unpleasantness and judgment. Most of the people are kind, some of them are wise. Some are alive with vitality and hope, others ghosts or near ghosts. The events that caused him to put his usual life on hold, and take up this oddyssey, will strike a responsive chord for many readers who have ever wanted to stop the world and step back in time. His experiences, the people he meets, the conversations they enjoy, make for an extraordinary insight into America.
The Essay on Jonathon Swifts Gullivers Travels Book Four
Jonathan Swift?s Gulliver?s Travel: Book Four When Gulliver?s Travels was first published in 1726, Swift instantly became history?s absolute most famous misanthrope. Thackeray was not alone in his outrage when he denounced it as ?past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene? (quoted in Hogan, 1979: 648). Since then, few literary works have ...
His writing sings in the way that the old story tellers did… weaving a web that captures and captivates you until you finish the book. And then you don’t stop until you’ve read all of his books! (Wish he’d write some more).
I recommend this book highly for personal reading and for gifts. In the brief first chapter, Least-Heat Moon describes how, in the space of one day, he learns that his position as an English professor was terminated because of declining enrollment, and that the wife from whom he was separated had been seeing someone new.
