Blue Highways – William Least Heat-Moon, 1982 ★★★★★

America Off the Beaten Path

What makes America? In 1978 a laid-off teacher of Anglo-Sioux ancestry drove across the United States to discover a land that reflected the dynamic, sometimes schizoid, multiplicity of its people.

Named after the secondary highways so-marked on road maps, Blue Highways details the state-by-state experiences of the newly separated and unemployed teacher William Least Heat-Moon. He freely admits he had no clear reason for starting his journey, other than general restlessness. But the book that came from it shows how great things can sometimes come without a clear plan:

A man lives in things and things are moving. He stands apart in such a temporary way it is hardly worth speaking of. If that perception dims egocentrism, that illusion of what man is, then it also enlarges his self, that multiple yet whole part which he has been, will be, is.

Kull: Exile Of Atlantis – Robert E. Howard, 2006 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★½

First Forays into Fantasy

It can be tempting to review a book by reviewing the author, especially when the author is famous for other books. How does this compare to those? It’s sad sport, and brutally unfair, but here I go anyway.

This Del Ray short-story collection presents Robert E. Howard’s first fantasy hero, Kull, who escaped a dead-end life on the island of Atlantis to become king of Valusia, “Land of Enchantment,” and mighty champion against threats both human and otherwise.

So let’s get it out of the way now: Kull is Howard’s initial attempt at establishing a barbarian conqueror, very much a rough draft, with not nearly the same depth or vitality as Conan. But Kull came first.

Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith, 1981 ★★★★½

A Mystery Wrapped inside an Enigma

Gorky Park dances on the narrow boundaries of genre fiction, a mystery that slides into straight crime fiction where a psychotic killer is pursued by a detective who runs an entire police force but can trust no one. And it is set in Soviet Russia, so there is much social commentary, too.

The challenge for me came not in enjoying it but wondering how its author managed to hold everything together all the way to its bloody, satisfying conclusion. Gorky Park is not a thrill ride – it is much too deliberately paced – but it delivers satisfaction across genres and some unexpected insights into the human condition.

Not to mention stark Russian atmosphere. I can’t think of a novel that sucked me so completely into another time and place as this one did.

Asterix In Switzerland – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1970 ★★

A Flower for Caesar

Moving into its second full decade, the Asterix series had settled into not one but two formulas: adventure spoofs and travelogues. Asterix In Switzerland employs the latter as it veers between mild fun and meh.

Goscinny and Uderzo deliver this tale of our favorite Gaulish rebels with a strange twist: instead of frustrating the efforts of their arch-enemy Julius Caesar, Asterix and his buddy Obelix must save Caesar’s auditor Vexatius Sinusistus from poisoning by a corrupt governor.

The First Frontier: The Indian Wars & America's Origins – David Horowitz, 1978 ★½

Exposing America's Birth Pains

At its best, The First Frontier is a gripping if scattershot account of the first steps taken by English settlers in New England and Virginia. Only the author can’t decide what it is he wants to write.

Is it about the displacement and slaughter of Native Americans? Or is it about how a new nation invented itself by first resisting, then selfishly rising up against the proper authority of its European overlord?

Published in 1978 when David Horowitz was a well-known leftist academic, The First Frontier echoes the social studies teacher in Dazed And Confused telling her class the upcoming Bicentennial is celebrating “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”