Scan barcode
queenbethie's review
4.0
Very interesting telling of a story I previously knew nothing about. A quick read or listen that highlights the first cross-country road trip.
jodiboe's review
4.0
Dayton Duncan >>> The audiobook was just like watching a good ol' Ken Burns documentary.
auntblh's review
4.0
This was a fun, quick read about the first road trip in America. I enjoyed reading about the troubles that were encountered. If anything, I would have liked more details. Maybe I will get more if I watch the PBS special for which this is the companion. My dad doesn't read but I think he might enjoy this.
glyptodonsneeze's review
4.0
This was great! Ken Burns documentaries make me fall asleep (that soft voice and those wiggling photographs), so maybe the audiobook of the companion volume is the way to go. This was a pretty fluffy topic for Burns and his less-famed compatriot Dayton Duncan, who wrote this companion volume. In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson made a wager at a San Francisco gentleman's club and two weeks later set off to drive across the entire United States. This is obvious gold, if only for the comic descriptions of being stuck in water or dust or mud up to the headlights and things falling off the car as it rattles along wagon roads. Nelson's companion and mechanic, Crocker, unfortunately left no recollections, and Nelson could have done a better job, but there is plenty here for a short, sweet book about Americans and who we are and how we got that way. When Nelson is nearly half way across the country, two auto companies start racing him in well-planned, better-supplied autos with company mechanics traveling ahead by train. Nelson wins, and hooray for the heroic underdog (who also has $8,000 1903 dollars to spend on a road trip in the first place). Good celebrity voice acting, and a few essays at the front and back to pad it out into a three hour narrative.
More...