The author goes by the dignified name of William Least Heat-Moon, and the front cover of his book shows a tiny speck of a boat puttering serenely on a river that meanders through the green hills. I don’t think I can be entirely faulted for anticipating a read that was more sedate, less angry, and less cynical than this one turned out to be.

Some miscellaneous comments:

1) There’s no denying that the author is a very talented writer.
2) I got tired of his profanity pretty quickly.
3) The book’s dedication makes it sound like the copilot was a composite of seven different people. If so, they all had pretty much the same personality.
4) “The Photographer” is one of the main figures, but very few photographs of any worth made it into the book.
5) The author despises the partying frat boys he encounters along his way, but he and his friends sometimes act like superannuated frat boys themselves.
6) The author is angry about the environmental state of the country, and he’s not shy about sniping at those he feels are to blame. I doubt that he turned very many of his readers Green. I think he would have been more successful if he had either molded his anger into a cogent argument or had very clearly led by example. What was the environmental cost of his journey? How would he possibly have made this journey if engineers had left the wilderness alone? That last question is actually posed to him by someone he meets on his voyage. His response was weak, I thought. ( )

Great book about an epic river trip across America in the late 1990's. Learned a lot of local history and that Mr. Trigdon is a great wordsmith. He was also able to expound on the sublimity of nature while not going into a tailspin when mentioning darker moments in our history, Makes me want to go to NW Oregon. ( )

I liked the idea of the book, and the author is a good storyteller, but I have to admit, two thirds of the way through I was suffering from river-story fatigue. The chapter-a-day thing eventually started wearing me down, and indeed the author admits as much when he condenses two longer runs into little more than slightly cooked notes which are much less engaging than the rest of the story. One more quibble, the author seems to have a love of obscure words--I don't remember ever having to look up so many in a non-technical book. The ending is, to put it mildly, anticlimactic. It may just be that I found the story too long and too repetitive. I stuck with it stubbornly to the end, as did the author, and I certainly learned a lot about American rivers. Have a book of his shorter pieces,"Here,There,Elsewhere," which I will give a try. Haven't read the book he's famous for but it's on my list too. ( )

An uncommon journey, but an intriguing one. I enjoy all of the references to other authors/philosophers along the way. ( )

Pretty good travel story...but it dragged a bit in spots. The best parts were the descriptions of the 'characters' they met along the way. All things considered, I like BLUE HIGHWAYS a bit more!. ( )