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Heat-Moon's accounts of his journeys along the byways of the United States are captivating classics. Now, with Roads to Quoz, he revisits the back roads of our country, making yet another well-told American journey. Recommended by Michal D., Powells.com
Review-A-Day
William Least Heat-Moon's Roads to Quoz...is a lucid if looping account of three years of wanderings that covered some 16,000 miles, mostly in the company of the author's wife (referred to as "Q"), a witness whose favorite Parker saying — "What fresh hell is this?" — is invoked more than once. Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times (read the entire Los Angeles Times review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
As the title of his new book suggests, William Least Heat-Moon has a great fondness for whimsical wordplay: cute puns, clever rhymes and alliterations, quaint and quirky vocabulary. This, his fourth travel book about the byways and backwaters of America, opens with a lengthy "quodlibet" to the letter Q: "Is there another letter with such a high percentage of words both jolly and curious, so many having... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to do with quests and questions and quintessences? Is it not a letter of signal q-riousness?" Of all the words that begin with "q," the one that beguiles him most is "quoz," an antique noun that rhymes with Oz and refers to anything strange, incongruous or peculiar. It also provides him with a handy organizing principle for a collection of rambling, disconnected journeys. By framing them as a quest for quoz, Least Heat-Moon gives himself free rein to go anywhere and write about anything that takes his fancy. Accompanied by his wife, Jo Ann, whose nickname is Quintana and hence "Q," he begins by exploring the valley of the Ouachita River (pronounced Warsh-taw) in Arkansas and Louisiana, and finds quoz in old-timey quilt patterns, pre-Columbian mounds, an account of a forgotten 1884 expedition and, most vividly, in the company of one Indigo Rocket, an artist who has crammed his cabin with strange illuminations and found objects, creating "an emporium to disorient one's sensorium." Then it's down to the Gulf coast of Florida, where the pickings aren't so easy. Searching for old waterfront saloons, he and Q discover that nearly all of them are gone, supplanted by quoz-free developments and sprawl. These are difficult times for someone of Least Heat-Moon's sensibility. The America he loves and writes about is authentic, regional, rooted in the land and its history; what's replacing it holds no interest for him. He scorns interstate highways, air travel, suburbs, commercialism, consumerism, electronic devices of all kinds — "whizz-bizzles," he calls them — and informs us that his drafts proceed from pencil to fountain pen. His first book, "Blue Highways," published nearly a quarter-century ago, was a break-out best-seller, largely because it assured its readers that America still had plenty of quirky charm, wild stories and colorful characters in its hinterlands. These days he seems to find his best material in history books and libraries. In Joplin, Mo., he delves into an old newspaper collection and comes out with a dazzling 40-page account of a murder and trial that took place in 1901. He solves a longstanding mystery about the case and then, with a final devastating sentence, reveals why he became so obsessed with it. His old road notebooks also supply some wonderful stories, including one about a wounded Korean war veteran who gave sexual favors to wealthy widows in return for money to build a school for troubled children. Considering that his most recent travels with Q lasted for three years and 16,000 miles, it's surprising and a little disheartening how little contemporary or surviving quoz they actually furnish. What fills the pages instead is the couple's banter and their ponderings on the nature of travel, modernity, existence and other topics. Mostly these are interesting and intelligent, although sometimes stylistically overwrought: "While probablists can do little more than postulate the possibility of a post-corporeal journey along a river, they can unquestionably make a verifiably veritable one (in what some "believers" consider our pre-afterlife)." On almost every page is an item of arcane vocabulary, and one page alone contains orogeny, acrophobe, flinder, tokus and feculence. This is a book with some superb passages, but to appreciate the whole of it you need to share Least Heat-Moon and Q's love of wordplay. You need to smile expectantly when you turn the page and find a chapter heading like "What the Chatternag Quarked" or "In Hopes Perdurable Reader Will Not Absquatulate." Waiting at the end of the book, as a bonus or a final penance, depending on your point of view, is a list of 250 made-up words beginning with quoz- and titled "THE NEW QUOZICON, ONE-QUARTER-THOUSAND QUOZO-NEOLOGISMS." Richard Grant is the author of "God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre." Reviewed by Richard Grant, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"As fans of his 1982 classic Blue Highways know, Least Heat-Moon loves the funky byways of America, which he revisits in this fat, rambling, and altogether wonderful new collection of travel tales. Grade: A" Entertainment Weekly
Review:
"An amiable, literate tour of America's byways, in the company of the poet laureate of the back road. Heat-Moon.... Residents of states not mentioned will surely wish that Heat-Moon's quozzical travels had taken him there as well — a pleasure for his fans, who are deservingly many." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Heat-Moon's journey is as meandering as the Ouachita itself, and readers will relish the experiences he and Q describe along their trip. He has not lost his skills in painting unforgettable portraits of places and people few of us will ever encounter." Joseph L. Carlson, Library Journal
Synopsis:
For the first time since the acclaimed "Blue Highways," Heat-Moon is back on the backroads with this lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.
Synopsis:
In his previous book "Blue Highways," Heat-Moon had embarked on an American journey off the beaten path. Now, the author is back on the backroads, in this lyrical, funny, and touching account of his series of journeys into small-town America.
Product details
581 pages
Little Brown and Company -
English9780316110259
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Michal D.,
Heat-Moon's accounts of his journeys along the byways of the United States are captivating classics. Now, with Roads to Quoz, he revisits the back roads of our country, making yet another well-told American journey.
by Michal D.
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day"
by Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times,
William Least Heat-Moon's Roads to Quoz...is a lucid if looping account of three years of wanderings that covered some 16,000 miles, mostly in the company of the author's wife (referred to as "Q"), a witness whose favorite Parker saying — "What fresh hell is this?" — is invoked more than once. (read the entire Los Angeles Times review)
"Review"
by Entertainment Weekly,
"As fans of his 1982 classic Blue Highways know, Least Heat-Moon loves the funky byways of America, which he revisits in this fat, rambling, and altogether wonderful new collection of travel tales. Grade: A"
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"An amiable, literate tour of America's byways, in the company of the poet laureate of the back road. Heat-Moon.... Residents of states not mentioned will surely wish that Heat-Moon's quozzical travels had taken him there as well — a pleasure for his fans, who are deservingly many."
"Review"
by Joseph L. Carlson, Library Journal,
"Heat-Moon's journey is as meandering as the Ouachita itself, and readers will relish the experiences he and Q describe along their trip. He has not lost his skills in painting unforgettable portraits of places and people few of us will ever encounter."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
For the first time since the acclaimed "Blue Highways," Heat-Moon is back on the backroads with this lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
In his previous book "Blue Highways," Heat-Moon had embarked on an American journey off the beaten path. Now, the author is back on the backroads, in this lyrical, funny, and touching account of his series of journeys into small-town America.
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