Customer Reviews

The Next Better Place: A Father and Son on the Road

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This delightfully written novelized memoir will hold your interest throughout. Now a professor of electronic media at Boston College, Keith takes us back to his boyhood and the always-on-the-road travels he shared with his well-meaning but ill-fated father who was always in quest of "the next better place" to find acceptance if not a viable livelihood.

Along the way we meet a perfectly amazing cornucopia of characters and places and situations all of which were more typical of a 1950's America before Interstate highways made everything the same. Keith's descriptions and characterizations are both visual and compelling showing that, though he was only briefly in formal schools, he surely learned a lot about life with this seemingly aimless bus and hitchhiker mode of travel.

Keith's tale combines a sometimes wistful tone with the insight that comes early when you are forced on your own resources for lack of much parental guidance. He has done well in recreating his thoughts and ideas in the context of a twelve-year-old amidst an adult world into which he is thrust all too quickly. The writing is compelling---you want to know what place is coming next, and what people he (and we) will meet along the way.

Recommended!

I had a chance to see a preview copy of this wonderful book. Never read anything quite like it. The author writes with a unique poetic flare about his childhood, which at once is bend over funny and lump on the throat sad. In both cases it is a marvelous read. He strikes the perfect note in the portrayal of his rogue dad. What an outrageous character! This is a story that really sticks with you. I think it will achieve the stature of classic in the memoir category. Hope the author is writing a sequel. I'll be the first one in line to buy it.

This is a wonderful book. "A road trip with an alcoholic father and a child? Must be a downer," you'd think. Not so. Never sliding into self-pity, the author just lays out a personal cross-country saga in mesmerizing detail. At times heartbreaking, this book is ultimately an inspirational story of survival by a child who deserved better. I've read a lot of travel narratives, and this is as good as they come.

This wonderful hitchhiking odyssey is all thumps up (or outstretched as the young boy would tell us). What a romp across 1960 America. It's the kind of book I'd love to see as a movie. Sure lends itself to the big screen because I have read few more visual stories. This is fun all the way to California and back! What a roll of the camera . . . and sentence.

Smiling ghosts of Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac hover over many pages of Michael Keith's "The Next Better Place." This captivating book places Keith squarely in the same row with America's finest writers of the road adventure story. Which is to say that "The Next Better Place" is so much more than a memoir-cum-novel of a precocious son traversing America's great expanses with an ageing picaro of a father. Keith knows when to embroider his book's perfectly intoned dialogue, tremulous details, and charming teenage bravado with both lyrical pathos and hints at the perverse. The greatest American road novel, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," also came to mind as I devoured Keith's book, and I can only hope that Keith will soon reward his readers with another one.

NOT a heartwarming account of travels with Daddy, this book is more like an inside view of life with a chronically unemployed, alcoholic drifter, in which the boy is neglected, filthy, near starved, and on several occasions sexually abused. From the cover notes, I had thought it would be something my family could listen to in the car, but definitely not. Well written, it held my interest, but I could only digest it in small pieces.

I ENJOYED THIS BOOK VERY MUCH,HOWEVER I'M A LITTLE CONFUSED ABOUT MR. KEITH'S DATES. HE SAYS THESE EVENTS TOOK PLACE IN 1959, WHEN HE WAS 11 YEARS OLD. HOWEVER ON THE "AUTHORS NOTE" PAGE IT GIVES HIS YEAR OF BIRTH AS 1945, WHICH WOULD HAVE MADE HIM 14 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME OF THESE EVENTS. ALSO HE MENTIONS SEVERAL TIMES THE SONG FROM THE MOVIE "THE MAGNIFICANT 7". HOWEVER THAT MOVIE WASNT RELEASED TILL THE EARLY 1960'S. NO BIG DEAL. JUST BAD PROOF READING BY THE PUBLISHERS.

I would normally give this book 5 stars, except I have a strong sense that this book is a fictional fraud.

It's the story of an 11 year old boy who hitchikes the country with his alcoholic, dead-beat father in search of a better life in California. Of course, California is no better than any other place they've been and they take buses back to Albany where his mother lives with his two sisters, only to ***spoiler*** go back out on the road again with his father at the end of the book.

The book is well written and engaging, but only if the book is true, which I doubt. The book often states what a good storyteller the father is and how good said father is at making up things to get what he wants out of people. The author continually expresses his desire to be on the radio or in movies, not to mention how often he embellishes stories, so I wouldn't be surprised if the book was just one big lie.

From the outset, the author states how he went 2 entire months without a bowel movement, which I don't even know is medically possible, much less didn't land him in the hospital. Plus he recounts in great detail names, places, and events that happened 40 years ago. And somehow, all these events involve sexual predators, thieves, and other ne'er-do-well's. Never any average people. Nah, I don't think the book is true.

But if it is true, it's really well done.