Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark [Hardcover]

Robert Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2006

From the bestselling author of Rats, a personal and national history of one of America's favorite pastimes: driving across the country.

The cross-country trip is the trip that often whizzes past us on our way to quaint back roads and scenic parks; it's an America of long, looping highways, strip malls, fast-food depots, and road rage, but also one that is wide-open, awe-inspiring, and heartwarmingly lonely. Here, Sullivan, who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times, recounts his family's annual summer migration from Oregon to New York. His story of moving his family back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast (and various other migrations), is replete with all the minor disasters, humor, and wonderful coincidences that characterize life on the road, not to mention life.

As he drives, Sullivan ponders his nation-crossing predecessors, such as legendary duo Lewis and Clark, as well the more improbable heroes of America's unending urge to cross itself: Carl Fisher, an Indianapolis bicycle maker who founded the Indy 500, dropped cars off of buildings and imagined the first cross-country road; Emily Post, who, before her life as an etiquette writer, was one of the first cross-country chroniclers; and the race car drivers who, appalled by the invention of seatbelts and speed limits, ran an underground cross-country car race in the 1970s known as the Cannonball Run. Sullivan meets Beat poets who are devotees of Jack Kerouac, cross-country icon, and plays golf on an abandoned coal mine. And, in his trademark celebration of the mundane, Sullivan investigates everything from the history of the gas pump to the origins of fast food and rest stops. Cross Country tells the tales that come from fifteen years of driving across the country (and all around it) with two kids and everything that two kids and two parents take when driving in a car from one coast to another, over and over, driving to see the way the road made America and America made the road.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sullivan (Rats; The Meadowlands) offers a boisterous, busily researched composite of trips he and his family have taken across the American continent. Sullivan claims he's gone from the West to East Coast and back about 27 times over the years, and on this particular summer sojourn, the vacationing family—comprising husband, wife and two kids, one a teenager—blast from Oregon back to their home in Brooklyn, N.Y., over five days. They first garner a personalized TripTik from AAA, which plots the route and provides essential information, then set out in a rented Impala. The author is adamant about stopping at the Columbia River Gorge to offer an extended digression on the Lewis and Clark expedition; the family then penetrates the intractable Bitterroot Range and manages to make time for Western highlights such as the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Mont., before sailing through Woody Guthrie country; Jack Kerouac's gas station in Longmont, Colo.; and speedily over the George Washington Bridge. The coffee-addled navigator engages in entertaining discourses on the standardized highway system, Emily Post and the provenance of the convenience-store coffee lid, among other subjects. His narrative is fun and chatty, with an emphasis squarely on the West. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Robert Sullivan, a contributing editor for Vogue, claims to have logged over 90,000 miles of transcontinental travel. Though Cross Country details just one of those jaunts, the experience comes in handy for this "charming memoir-cum-rumination on the great American road trip" (New York Times Book Review). Where his earlier books featured immersive, expansive treatments of narrow subjects (Rats, ***1/2 July/Aug 2004; The Meadowlands), here the rolling odometer opens up a hodgepodge of topics for this "urban Thoreau" (Boston Globe). A few critics feel there's too much room to mentally roam, but most reviewers proclaim it a trip well worth taking.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582345279
• ISBN-13: 978-1582345277
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #447,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Multilevel Travels, August 15, 2006

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark (Hardcover)

You can sometimes tell a lot more about a book from its subtitle than its title. This is surely the case with _Cross Country: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant_ (Bloomsbury) by Robert Sullivan. You can view the sample of the topics in the book on display in the subtitle, but more important, you get an idea that Sullivan is a writer who cannot resist cramming more in. This was true in his last book, _Rats_, an examination of a rat colony in New York City, and is even more true in this big and desultory rumination on the great American road trip. Sullivan reports that when in the car, "I am - like a tour director nobody paid for, like a tour guide nobody can stop, like a human roadside plaque - going on and on... I wish I could control myself; my explications worry me to some extent." His family, he reflects, is a captive audience, but he invites the reader to remember that the book can be put down for a few minutes or possibly forever. Many will find this expansive book disorderly and self-indulgent, but I found it hard to put down, and was sorry when the long trip was all done. Sullivan is an engaging, informative, and funny writer, and in a book that is about wandering, he never really wanders off subject, but he does pull in facts and history about an astonishing range of topics, from roadside sculptures to the Cannonball Run.

Sullivan has driven across the country more than two dozen times, since he has contacts on both coasts. The book is ostensibly a memoir of a trip from Oregon to New York, just a family driving, mostly on interstates, and initially following the return route of Lewis and Clark. His "Hey, who wants to read from the Lewis and Clark journals this time?" might have been greeted with moans, but the kids and wife seem to be good sports about it all. (And the son does the reading.) He has historically appropriate fiddle music ready on CDs. Though Lewis and Clark form the major digressions in this memoir, Sullivan is fascinated by later cross country travel. We learn, for instance, that cross-country drivers used to stay in campgrounds, and then bungalows, and then into something new called motor courts, auto hotels, or motor hotels. These were called "autels" before "motels" became the accepted term. Though hotels tried to be a "home away from home", they gained a bad reputation; in 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, said motels were "dens of vice and corruption." Who knew that there was a history of lids for coffee cups? Most to-go coffee lids are "drink-through" lids, and the first one, the "Stubblefield Lid" was patented in 1935. Stubblefield is not to be confused with "the guitar pick", which leaves a remnant of plastic once the user rips a wedge-shaped piece from the edge, or the "peel and lock" lid, or the pinch lid, or the 8FTL model, or the pucker lid, or the Solo Traveler which wound up as an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. "I invariably look to the lid, as a predictor," Sullivan writes. "I study it as I open it, if only briefly, with anticipation of rejuvenation, in the same way that I might look at a church door."

Sullivan is ecstatic about using the interstates. "When I am on the road, I see the America that is a continual expedition, the never-ending race to the last frontier, rural or suburban or exurban. In other words, America _is_ the road." He finishes with a coda of amazements, amazement about trips in canoes and on foot, amazement over the changing face of America, amazement that we can ride suspended over a mile-high river. He is as enthusiastic about the history of the gas pump as he is about the origins of fast food or the efforts of Lewis and Clark reenactors. He is a terrific guide, and the book is a great trip.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Journey That Gets Off at Almost Every Exit, September 23, 2006

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Wayne A. Smith (Newark, DE) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark (Hardcover)

Cross Country is about straight driving on America's interstates. The book, however, is more like a Sunday afternoon ramble over country lanes with many detours and unplanned stops.

Robert Sullivan is a cross-country veteran, having made numerous trips from coast to coast in pursuit of jobs, weddings and vacations. The central thread of this book is his latest cross country trip back from a west-coast family wedding to home in New York City. Along the way, Sullivan gets sidetracked many times, delving into past trips, the "cross country trip from hell," the creation of the interstate system, rest stops, towel dispensers in rest stops, rest stop coffee, rest stop food, road side art and most enduringly, Lewis and Clark related stops in the North and Upper Western parts of his journey (the author has an abiding fascination with the first US cross-country explorers).

At its best, Cross Country is a fascinating collection of trivia and stories behind the interstate system. At its worst, it's like watching somebody else's home movies. Fortunately, the home movie aspect is less than the fascinating. I enjoyed the in-depth telling of the creation of the interstate road network, and Sullivan has a collection of interesting factoids about America's roads, crash and safety statistics and the personalities behind the creation of America's national road system. He also highlights Lewis and Clark's journey whenever the road crosses their trail. He delves into the story of incredibly mundane aspects of road travel, like the development and variety of coffee lids and the pros and cons of competing bathroom towel dispenser designs. (It really is more interesting than it sounds - he writes these well.)

Interspersed with these vignettes is the family trip. His family is a nice enjoyable lot; these parts of the book range from witty and amusing to tedious. Sullivan is no Bill Bryson when it comes to travel writing, but he has produced an enjoyable book nonetheless.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sullivan always finds the story beneath the story, July 15, 2006

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Marla (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark (Hardcover)

This guy is an excellent writer. He could write about rats and it would be interesting. Wait, he DID write about rats and it was interesting. "Cross Country" is about Sullivan, like most of his books, but he somehow dodges the navel-gazing traps of so many so-called memoirists out there.