Roads

From Duluth, Minnesota to New Orleans, from Washington DC to Dallas, from Boston to the Florida Keys, Larry McMurtry rides the long highways that criss-cross the North American continent.

Larry McMurtry, a child and chronicler of the West and its wild past, is more at home travelling the Great Plains or the Montana wilderness or Louisiana's Atchafalaya swamp than he is traversing the more manicured lands of the eastern seaboard.

He is discursive and anecdotal, and is unmasked as a competitor to Alistair Cooke as he holds forth most entertainingly on other writers (he's amazingly well read), history, what people did, said, thought, wore, in no particular order.

If he can stray from the point, he will, and the result is rich, nostalgic, cultural, beguiling and a must for any romantic soul who has ever longed to travel those wide open spaces where the buffalo roam under an endless sky.