Route 66 Still Kicks

August 15, 2012
An uninspiring grab bag of a journey down the storied highway. Route 66 is crumbling in spots, even gone to grass and dirt across decommissioned stretches along its path. But it lives on, largely because of Bobby Troup's musical anthem, given in incomplete form to Nat King Cole and forged in his hands into a pop hit. The best part of Antonson's (To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey Through West Africa, 2008, etc.) grinding biography is his look at Troup's song; given the importance of Albuquerque, N.M., as a waypoint along the route, he wonders why it isn't celebrated in the song. The author travels the length of the highway, stuffing his narrative with as many anecdotes and oddments as he can cram in, with the result that the book has a tight-as-a-tick bloat to it. Some of them do useful work; Antonson does a good job, for instance, of considering the contributions of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to the making of the Route 66 image in the American mind. But others are there just to be there, it seems, from the painfully obvious (" 'Joliet' Jake Blues, a character portrayed in the 1980 Blues Brothers movie by actor John Belushi, drew his nickname from this town") to the painfully overstretched (of Mickey Mantle: "many people stopped caring--not unlike the highway he called home"). A moment of confused dialogue concerning whether the author of the line "Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" was Jackson Browne or Savoy Brown is emblematic--the answer is easy to look up, utterly unimportant and well-known to anyone who cares about such things. A snooze. There's no ill intent here, but so important a road deserves a better book.

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September 15, 2012
Their hopes for a trip to Asia dashed, the author (president of Tourism Vancouver and a frequent traveler) and his friend Peter quickly came up with plan B: Route 66, the legendaryand now mostly bypassedhighway that spans nearly 2,500 miles from Illinois to California. The result is this lighthearted travelogueRick and Peter being a sort of road-comedy teambut the book also has its bittersweet moments, since to remember Route 66 in its heyday is to remember an America that no longer exists. The book is full of interesting or amazing historical facts (for example, Illinois was the first state to completely pave its portion of Route 66, way back in the Roaring Twenties, because Al Capone needed a good road to transport bootleg liquor). It might be a bit too artsy-fartsy to call the book a road trip into the past, but along the way, Rick and Peter do discover bits of the original Route 66, untouched by the modern world, including a smattering of people who live along the original roadway and who seem to have stepped out of the past. A winning mixture of travelogue and history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)