ROAD READS
ROAD READS
"Cross Country," by Robert Sullivan
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BOOK: "Cross Country," by Robert Sullivan (Bloomsbury, $24.95)
TARGET AUDIENCE: People buckled in for the next 3,000 miles.
You may feel that you know Sullivan. Listen to him a while, talking about Lewis and Clark or the time he saw Evel Knievel in an Italian restaurant. Sullivan is everybody's dad on a long cross-country car trip -- setting schedules, getting lost and trying to make the whole experience educational. To the credit of his children, they do remarkably little eye-rolling during their trip from Portland, Ore., to New York.
It's amazing that this book works. Though well-told, his mini-histories of the American pioneers, the interstate highway system and the Chevy Impala, among other topics, have been told before. And by more qualified people. Further, the family's highway adventure is too ordinary to sustain an entire book. But somehow by blending these elements, he holds your interest, and you forgive the occasional "I-guess-you-had-to-be-there" vignette or the wildly irrelevant historical tidbit. After all, this is Dad -- do you want to make him stop this car?
-- Jerry V. Haines
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