Customer Reviews

Blue Ride

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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I would like to enter a reader review of Ken Wilkerson's "Blue Ride", which I found to be very engaging. It's woven together like a series of vignettes, with recurring characters living around the highways and small towns of the Southern California desert. It starts off with a fast, allegorical tale of alienation---then moves on to an amusing misadventure in a bordertown bar--- then a story about a couple amiable drifters on an existential search---then the jaded narrative of "Jack Chase", an on-the-skids detective---then it continues on, revisiting the participants in various desert locales. Along the ride are visitations from two artists, Andy Wilf and Gram Parsons, who lived similarly chaotic lives, and an account of the author and a companion as they journeyed on foot down an ancient Indian trail. There's a lot of heart, humor, craziness, adventure, compulsive wandering, tequila and contemporary lore of the desert packed into 122 pages. This is a solid piece of work.

I just read BLUE RIDE and would like to agree with the reader review from Chicago. Blue Ride is the true California desert, as I knew it during 33 years of living there, before the growing spread of tourism and overdevelopment. Blue Ride evokes the mystery of the pure desert, the ramshackle towns with colorful characters, the freedom of the open road in pre-homogenized America. It also serves as a documentation of a unique place and time in Southern California. The author's quirky adventures are very compelling

I would like to recommend "Blue Ride". Having been raised in the California desert, I regard Blue Ride as a definitive work of that area. It's written in a lively style, with a sense of immediacy which transported me to those dusty towns and landscapes of my youth. The poetic descriptions of the various desert locales are deadly accurate, and the central characters are genuine renegades from the contemporary mainstream. Ken Wilkerson writes with poignancy, creating the taste of REAL LIFE in that intriguing corner of the southwest. A very original work.

For anyone looking for a great read, this is the book. An excellent storyteller, Wilkerson paints vivid pictures of the desert, but he writes more like a photographer than a painter. He describes his characters with the eyes of a lens that goes in and out of focus as his characters teeter the fine line of sanity. Wilkerson's images are so clear they are like a slap on the back by Casteneda's Don Juan character, a slap that shifts one's perception from merely looking to really seeing. Blue Ride is filled with some of the most interesting characters I have read in a long time. Blue is the color; wild is the ride.

Ken Wilkerson's _Blue Ride_, filled with scalding hot of days of cacti, Mexicans, beer-swilling, Gram Parsons, California freeways and the mythos of the Southwest desert, is a fun ride--I mean, READ! Instead of being tedious and repetitive, the travails of Wilkerson's characters, driving endlessly through the desert from town to town, sometimes without destination, are subtly filled with that reverence for the moment that is so rare in normally busy lives.

The book is written in mostly short chapters. They allow one to read quickly, and ponder in repose. The characters both blur together in their lives under the hot, desert sun, and are VERY distinct in their views, their friends, their troubles. Most importantly, they do not take away from the overwhelming setting: the beautiful desert that provides background for the characters and often comes into the foreground unexpectedly.

If you love writing that takes "one day at a time," if you love the desert and its demands and rewards for its reverent, and thoroughly irreverent, occupants, then this is the book for you.

I liked "Blue Ride" a lot. As I read, I felt like I'd entered another world, away from the crowded cities, television and popular culture. The stories actually do--as the book cover states-- "emerge from the desert roads and outback towns of the American Southwest". The author has revealed the marrow of an uncommon life in the Southern California Badlands.

After reading Blue Ride, I was struck with the visual descriptions of the California desert, and the group of characters, obviously drawn from the author's personal life. The entertaining collection of short stories is highly interesting in its unique perspective. The three stories involving a private detective are gritty, with the flavor of fifties-noir set in towns of the Mojave Desert. Wilkerson's fluid prose never slows, especially when relating the escapades of himself and Andy Wilf, a fellow artist bent on creating a little chaos in the sleepy, unprepared hamlet of Yuma, Arizona. The glimpses of the land itself, and the author's affection for the country he depicts, are moments well worth re-reading. I think this book is a rare, true-life account of someone walking a road not traveled by others. If I didn't already have it, I would buy it.