Customer Reviews

Roads To Quoz: An American Mosey

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Excellent. Classic Heat-Moon quoziness exploring the corners of the US that few others ever bother to report from. Few, if any, write with such a glint in their eye as he does. Each chapter is a new delight of oddity - full of colour, sounds, and smells. Most of the smells are great...

WLHM has a knack of writing about places in a way that makes me want to visit if not the exact same destinations, then at least an opolis in the right direction..just over there.. Great stuff. I don't know how long until his next book will be published but I hope it's not too long a wait.

Halfway through its 581 pages William Least Heat-Moon quotes from "Tristram Shandy" It is one of the keys to appreciating a book which is subtitled "An American Mosey." Where most books in the travel genre follow a course or seek out a destination "Roads to Quoz" is a meander. Heat-Moon goes exploring the Ouachita Valley in Arkansas, dips into an over-urbanised Florida, goes to New Hampshire's White Mountains, sails the Intracoastal Waterway.

"Mosey", he tells us, derives from the Spanish "vamos". The discursive narrative has snippets of autobiography. He has once been a doctoral student in English literature. He meditates on words like "absquatulate" and "shinplaster", a term for worthless money. Moonshine is also known as white lightning, bottled-in-the-barn booze or Ozark nose paint. He himself is on a forty-eight month deacquisition plan. He wants to rid himself of one item, large or small, each and every day.

The second key is the author's age. He has reached that time in life where he is relaxed in himself, where he does not need to prove himself. "As travellers age" he writes "we carry along ever more journeys, especially when we cross through a remembered terrain where we become wayfarers in time as well as space, where physical landscapes get infused with temporal ones."

As in his previous books Heat-Moon knows his American history inside out. Audubon, Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, Eli Lilley all feature. It is a very different America from the high-pressure urban backdrop of film and news. Contemporary reference is scattered about but thinly. He sees a saloon with a sign "HIPPIES ENTER BY SIDE DOOR". He makes reference to a Negro part of town. What he calls the Babylonian war is costing three billion a week; that could make good a lot of worn infrastructure.

South of Charleston SC he encounters a water-land with names like Toogoodoo, Wadmalaw, Ashepoo and Coosaw. The anti-modernity of his prose leans at moments to the precious. In earlier life his livelihoods have included "delivering newspapers in the wee hours". He addresses direct the "perdurable reader" or "nimble reader (who are so often ahead of me)". "Roads to Quoz" is probably one for Heat-Moon familiars. If he is new to you sample "Blue Highways" or "River Horse" first.

William Least Heat Moon is one of our favorite writers since 'Blue Highways'.
Since then we have collected most of his work and would thoroughly recommend
him RGC