Customer Reviews

Driving to Detroit : An Automotive Odyssey

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

OK, so aluminum doesn't rust and it wasn't Rambo who said "I'll be back." Big deal. "Driving to Detroit" is a still compelling read, more memoir than textbook, an engaging account of a woman's uniquely personal journey. Those looking for nuts-and-bolts automotive statistics and measurements should look elsewhere; those who love "road" books, however, will find this one worth adding to their collections. Is it a woman's book? Definitely. But it's also a book for men who love cars and aren't afraid to examine that love affair more deeply.

This is a book about Mrs. Hazelton and little else. She goes places where interesting things are happening, says little about them and doesn't talk to the people involved in those events. She wants to talk about herself. Tossing her hair and fantasizing that she is a movie star as she is photographed in a fabulous 1930s French car is worth pages but the person who restored the car is dismissed quickly. She attends a classic car auction without getting to know anyone involved. But she paints a negative picture of everyone involved without learning anything about those people.

Whenever Ms. Hazelton mentions other people, she sneers briefly and moves on. Most of those people sounded more interesting than Ms. Hazelton.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon is a much better travel experience book. He talks to people and finds interest in what they say and do.

Driving to Detroit is about automobiles to about the same extent as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repairing is about motorcycles. Driving to Detroit is about America. It is a deeply penetrating, highly compelling, extremely entertaining analysis of our culture. People who like Barbara Kingsolver's fiction or William Least Heat Moon's travel journalism will love this book. It belongs in the travel and sociology sections of bookstores, not hidden among auto-repair manuals in the transportation section which is where I always finally find it when I want copies for nieces and nephews and other friends.

Ms. Hazelton writes with honesty and elegance. She exposes the strength and beauty of our special kind of aggressiveness in America, but she also exposes its ugly side -- with delicacy and compassion. She is a consumate journalist, and a thoroughly competent psychologist. She misses nothing, but has a remarkable flare for knowing how much to reveal and in what kind of time frame. I find that subtle insights created by her apparently innocent descriptions of people and events are still seeping through the layers of my awareness, bursting into consciousness and amazing me at the oddest times.

Unfortunately, books like this one don't fit into the kinds of simplistic niches that make marketing easy. Driving to Detroit is about psychology, and sociology, and culture, and education; and human decency, and conflict, and generosity and opportunism; and automobiles.

not much in the way of car talk as you might expect in such a book..Rather disjointed, not worth a read...

There's nothing like a little intellectual arrogance from across the pond to get under my skin. What's been highly acclaimed by others as an introspective journey into Ms. Hazleton's self is instead a rambling stream of (un)consiousness that's so chock full of errors that it just adds up to one big irritation.

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but when a person who is an automotive journalist, private pilot, environmentalist, car enthusiast, and supposed "keen observer of human nature" sets forth so many incorrect or just plain goofy interpretations of events that even I pick up on them, I wonder how she's gotten the gigs she has. Let alone if she deserves them.

Here's a quick example:

To press home a point, she says "As Rambo said, 'I'll be back'". Sorry, Arnold as The Terminator said that. This from the keen observer of our woeful American popular culture.

As she passes the aviation boneyard in Arizona, she's suprised by the "lack of rust" on the aircraft. Being aluminum, they don't rust very often. Remember, she's an auto journalist, enthusiast, and private pilot.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

The irony is that in decrying the very inventions she herself can't seem to live without and in having, at best, a shaky command of the facts, her attempt to scale a flagpole that rises above the teeming masses like me to point out our ignorance just gives us all a better view of her backside.

In chronicling her far off-the-beaten-path 13,000 mile journey from Seattle to Detroit, Ms. Hazleton both celebrates and skewers the American love affair with the automobile.