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Summary
Summary
About a quarter century ago, a previously unknown writer named William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways . Acclaimed as a classic, it was a travel book like no other. Quirky, discursive, endlessly curious, Heat-Moon had embarked on an American journey off the beaten path. Sticking to the small places via the small roads -- those colored blue on maps -- he uncovered a nation deep in character, story, and charm.
Now, for the first time since Blue Highways , Heat-Moon is back on the backroads. Roads to Quoz is his lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.
Author Notes
William Least Heat-Moon is the author of the bestselling classics Blue Highways, River-Horse, and PrairyErth . He lives near Columbia, Missouri.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It was almost a decade ago that Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) followed the trail of Lewis and Clark in River Horse; in the first section of his latest peripatetic writings, he and his wife, Q, trace the lesser-known Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 through the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase, searching out the head of the Ouachita River in Arkansas. Least Heat-Moon's fans will find this territory, and that covered in the five other "journeys to places a goodly portion of the American populace would call 'nowhere,'" instantly familiar, as he and various companions take digressive paths from one small opolis ("where anything metro was clearly missing") to the next in search of "quoz" (an 18th-century word meaning "anything out of the ordinary"). Among his many adventures, Least Heat-Moon rides a bicycle along an abandoned railroad track, discovers a "road to nowhere" built by a Florida county so local drug smugglers would have a landing strip, and comes up with what he believes is the real story behind the murder of his great-grandfather. Or maybe the highlights of these journeys are the people he meets along the way and their stories, like the man who tried to fund a school for disadvantaged children by providing lonely widows with special massages, or the artist who's turned his cabin into a walk-in kaleidoscope. Either way, few readers will be able to resist tagging along. (Oct. 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Heat-Moon's love for back roads, buried history, mesmerizing stories, and colorful language launched a life of inquisitive travels and meticulous writing. In his fifth book, this attentive listener and observer and sly wit in the mode of Twain reports on his quest for quoz, that is, anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar. Accompanied by his smart, funny lawyer-historian wife, Q, Heat-Moon follows the 1804 trail of William Dunbar and George Hunter on the forgotten Jeffersonian mission along the Ouachita River through Arkansas and Louisiana. Amidst hilarious commentary on road food and uncharismatic small towns, Heat-Moon continues on to Florida, Maine, New Mexico, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas, writing vividly and insightfully about diverse and quirky places. But it is the people he meets, or resurrects, that give this spellbinding and immensely satisfying book its soul. From freethinker William Grayson, shot down on the street in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901 (Heat-Moon finally solves the case) to artist Indigo Rocket, a wizard of quoz ; Jean Ingold, whose carbon footprint was that of a cat ; conservator James Canary, guardian of Kerouac's On the Road scroll; Glenn Gore, who is dedicated to photographing every mile of the Ouachita; and Frank Xavier Brusca, who is doing the same for U.S. Highway 40. Natural, national, and personal history converge in this resplendent mosey, an inspiriting antidote to hurry and a profound tribute to this good land and its people.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Another American journey with William Least Heat-Moon. FEW people, aside from truckers, semi-well-known country singers, and maybe a few highway-obsessed hobbyists, have been to as many places in the United States of America as Wil- liam Least Heat-Moon. He refers to him- self, justly, as "an elder of the road." His book "Blue Highways" (1982), which he began in a van on the day his wife and his job left him, is in a lot of ways synonymous with the transcendent experience of the American road trip - the regional meal as opposed to Applebee's "special," a luxury-condo-free view that Lewis and Clark might have discovered if they had traveled by Airstream rather than canoe. A quarter-century later, the very phrase "blue highways" is still shorthand for those mini-nirvanas, those epiphanylike road moments that, in Heat-Moon's latest book, "The Road to Quoz," he now refers to by the disused word quoz (rhymes with schnoz) : "a noun, both singular and plural, referring to anything strange, incongruous or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious." "I'm speaking about a quest for quoz," he writes as he sets off, "of which I'll say more as we go along, but until then, you might want to see Quoz as a realm filled with itself as a cosmos is with all that's there, not just suns and planets and comets, but dust and gas, darkness and light and all we don't know, and only a fraction of what we can imagine." Since "Blue Highways" - which was followed by "PrairyErth," a slow and low-mileage book about a single Kan- sas county, and "River-Horse," about a cross-country trip by boat - Heat-Moon's M.O. has changed: "The Road to Quoz" is not one long road trip, but a series of short- er ones, taken over the past few years: a circumnavigation of Maine's North Woods by car; a trip along the coast from Balti- more to Florida by boat; and a voyage in Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains by rail bike (a bicycle retooled to cruise along aban- doned railroad tracks), on which, Heat- Moon writes, "the movement was that in a dream where gravity doesn't exist." Though the trips are short, the book feels long, in part because the author defiantly refuses to offer any kind of thesis: he praises quilts, wandering and moseying precisely at moments where we start wondering where we're headed. He gestures toward various schemas for the nation -mapping territory according to fondness for Moon Pies or lack of plausible martinis - but his point is serendipity and joyous disorder. "A genuine road book should open unknown realms in its words as it does in its miles," he writes. "If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it's just to the Quickee Mart." Sometimes the moseying leads to lovely moments. On a bluff at the end of the Ouachita River, in Louisiana, the author's wife, nicknamed Q (after her interest in all things beginning with the letter, beginning with the Mexican revolutionary Quintana Roo) says, "I wish somebody would come along." Enter Tuffy Parish, a retired rope-company worker, who takes them to a little spot the locals use to meditate on the river's end, where they stand quietly. Seeing Heat-Moon's notebook, Parish says, "You put in how we take care of the end of the river." Sometimes this sort of trip leads to wonderful people: Jack Kerouac must be happy in his Buddhist Catholic afterlife to know that the guy taking care of the 120-foot-long scroll manuscript for "On the Road" is an ancient text-loving Buddhist Hoosier named Jim Canary, who carries his "Jack in the box" and who has been waived through by excited airport security officials who mistook it for the Dead Sea scrolls. Sometimes the book is mostly about the book itself, and the exertions it required of its author. "In a few weeks, this sheet of paper before me at this moment and on which I am setting down these words with a fountain pen and the subsequent typed revisions - will all be inside a box in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri," he writes after his encounter with Canary. "Perhaps someday you, a distant reader, might see this very manuscript page, and I'll be honored by your curiosity. As for the hand, the arm, and the other attached parts directing the pen, they will lie unboxed and nowhere other than wherever, as dust is wont to do." THE road almost inevitably tricks a road-book author into adding sentences he will one day wince at, having only imagined they were good, like a mirage. The difference between "Blue Highways" and "The Road to Quoz" is that the author has gone from what feels like a love of the road to a love-hate of it, or at least an impatience with aspects that are unavoidable, such as other people. The fisherman who doesn't seem to appreciate his river locale as much as Heat-Moon would like him to; the couple who say grace over a meal in a way that strikes him as insincere; the woman reading romance novels on a cruise down the Southeastern coast ("I judge by the cover," he writes) whom he later slams in a journal entry ("Without her grievances, Mrs. Y.'s life seems nearly without purpose") - we hear a little too much of what might be better off as motel pillow talk between the author and Q. The road gets to all of us, especially after thousands and thousands of miles. But in the end, it's best not to let the road get your quoz out of joint. Heat-Moon's M.O. has changed; 'The Road to Quoz' is not one long road trip but a series of shorter ones. Robert Sullivan is the author of "Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America." His book "The Thoreau You Don't Know" will be published in March.
Kirkus Review
An amiable, literate tour of America's byways, in the company of the poet laureate of the back road. Heat-Moon (River-Horse, 1999, etc.), as if channeling Kerouac, whom he writes about here at some length, announces early on a rationale for his wanderings and writings over the last quarter-century or so: "to break those long silent miles, I must stop and hunt stories and only later set down my gatherings in order to release them one day to wander on their own." In this instance, grown suddenly fond of the letter Q, he ponders the word quoz ("rhymes with Oz"), a quizzical, questioning quest in search of who knows what, so long as it's wonderful. So he heads at first west by way of the wondrous Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, which are really ancient worn-down hills separated by a broad valley full of colorful characters, some with teeth, some with stills. Heat-Moon, naturally enough, turns to suitable pondering, reflecting that many years before he had found himself "wondering how many people I'd meet if I lived to be four score and ten," and reckoning that the total might be 100,000, almost all of them pleasant "or at least neutral" encounters. Here, as the author steers into the dark hearts of Maine, Pennsylvania, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida and other corners of this wide land, he turns up plenty of nice folk who serve him fried chicken, scrod or tacos and tell him tales of their lives. Heat-Moon's travels have a Steinbeckian air, but with a decidedly countercultural twist, as when he pronounces, "To live more otherly is to live more lastingly. It's a fundamental law of biology." Residents of states not mentioned will surely wish that Heat-Moon's quozzical travels had taken him there as wella pleasure for his fans, who are deservingly many. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Here's another road trip from the author of Blue Highways, who says we've got to travel slowly and deliberately if we want to eat well along the way. No fast-track tour, of course. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
