Customer Reviews

Route 66 Remembered

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

 

 

This book isn't a travel guide or a map-style publication, but a really cool scrapbook of the Mother Road. Witzel's sidebars on interesting segments of road culture are fascinating. The photography is great, too. Unlike a lot of the other 66 books, this one is divided up into chapters on gas stations, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions. The final chapter, "Mother Road Memories," recounts the true tales of people who actually took the trip down 66 and really takes you back to the way it used to be when traveling across country. Of all the roadside books I have in my library, I would highly recommend this treasure. It's one of Witzel's best ......

I got this book before going on a trip down 66, along with a few others. I loved it. I had a lot of the people I met along the way sign the book and once in a while, got some of the owners of restaurants, gas stations, roadside attractions, and diners featured in the book to sign it. What a wonderful scrapbook to have of one of the last great American road trips!

Great idea for the traveler/reader wanting to taste a slice of true Americana. Lots of nostalgia in this big, colorful table size book. Takes you back in time and down one of America's iconic byways...Chock full of unique photos and stories of a time and place that may never come our way again...

This is a great book, and not just a rehash of other Route 66 material that's already out there.

When I bought this book I was looking for help planning a Route 66 trip. While it hasn't really served that purpose, it has provided pages of nice pictures and some degree of inspiration to get on the road. Maybe I'll like the book even more once I've completed the trip and want to take an occassional look back.

This is a book about a road -- but there's no roadmap! The author chose to structure the book's five chapters around such things as tourist traps, filling stations, places to eat, motor hotels, and "memories". While, of course, these are interesting things along a road, the salient characteristic of a road is that it goes from one place to another. What are those places? What sequence of states/towns/views do you encounter as you travel this road? This book provides no geographical context for its pictures and disjointed text about the Mother Road.

A road also has a temporal dimension. This book fails to provide a sense of how this great road has changed over time. Although there are pictures from various dates, there is no organization, and old photos are indiscriminantly intermixed with new ones.

It is interesting to thumb through the book, but the Route 66 Remembered is only a random collection of scenes with no direction.