| Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 989
Category: Book
Author: William Least Heat-moon
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Studio: Little, Brown and Company
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
Label: Little, Brown and Company
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.8
ISBN: 0316110256
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.3
EAN: 9780316110259
ASIN: 0316110256
Publication Date: October 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
An engaging tour of quaint and quirky people and places November 24, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Samuel Johnson said it in five words: `Solitude is dangerous to reason,'" writes the author. "I can think of no greater reason for taking to the American road."
In 1982, William Least Heat-Moon published Blue Highways, a remarkable book whose title refers to highways colored blue on maps. Now, in Roads to Quoz, he ventures again off the beaten path to encounter quirky but charming out-of-the-way places and people.
With an easy banter, Heat-Moon engages those whom he meets along the way--colorful characters eager to tell their stories. Venturing from Florida to New Mexico, Maine, and Idaho, and to other states in between, he writes with the delightful wit and humor reminiscent of Twain, Steinbeck, or Jack Kerouac.
He explains that "quoz" (rhymes with Oz) means anything out of the ordinary: "anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious."
Not all of America, perhaps not even the best, can be found along the Interstate highways or in the big cities. As the poet Robert Frost put it, "I took the road less traveled by--and that has made all the difference."
William Least Heat-Moon, the pen name of William Trogdon, is of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry. He lives near Columbia, Missouri, on an old tobacco farm he's returning to forest. His first book, Blue Highways, is a narrative of a 13,000-mile trip around America on back roads. His second work, PrairyErth, is a tour on foot into a small corner of the great tallgrass-prairie in eastern Kansas. River-Horse is an account of his four-month, sea-to-sea voyage across on the United States on its rivers, lakes, and canals. His three books on travels have never been out of print. Heat-Moon is also the author of Columbus in the Americas, a compendium of the explorer's adventures in the New World.
Quoz November 23, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I wasn't sure there was a word for what happens to me when I read Heat-Moon's works. I find treaures in them that seem to be written just for me to find. How can that be?
"PrairyErth" was such a treasure-box; I have read it every year since it was written, each time finding something new. "Roads to Quoz" is also such a book. Its wisdom, depth and humor take you on journeys that are pure joy for the intellect and the imagination.
Heat-Moon's "roads to Quoz" cover a vast area, so I was suprised that one of his Quoz stories mentioned a tiny town in Kansas called "Otis". It is where my mother grew up. I cannot explain such crossings of paths, but at least now I have a word for them: Quoz.
This is simply a gem of a book. It looks forward and backward at the same time, giving insights along the way, and finding wonder.
Gary Gackstatter, St Louis
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