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Product Description
A critically acclaimed writer drives a Porsche across the United States, investigating how the automobile has shaped our lives and defined the American psyche.
According to John Updike, every seventeen years the average American male drives the distance from the Earth to the moon. But the average American male doesn't get to do it in a sleek silver Boxster on loan from Porsche. Fulfilling his lifelong fantasy, James Morgan took the Boxster, a model so new it had yet to be driven in America, and hit the road, often following the same trail (sometimes at speeds over 130 miles per hour) that Lewis and Clark took on their early crossing of the country.
The Distance to the Moon is about the American love affair with the car and the open road--what James Morgan calls "the epic entanglement that's defined this century and reshaped the face of America." Morgan takes us from Florida to Oregon, stopping at sites such as Carhenge (think Stonehenge, with cars, in Nebraska) and interviewing everyone from the old car ad men--who knew what it was Americans yearned for--to car collectors, automobile designers, psychologists, and city planners in an attempt to find out why we're obsessed with our automobiles.
The Distance to the Moon is the story of one man whose dream came true--and how it changed him. It is for everyone who has ever shared Morgan's fantasy of jumping in a fast car and hitting the open road, never to return. James Morgan has been praised as a writer and craftsman who understands the American psyche. With him in the driver's seat, we enjoy every second of the ride.
Amazon.com Review
In his early 50s, James Morgan yields to a restless urge and hits the road in a fast car. In The Distance to the Moon (a title owing to the speculations of John Updike, who wrote that every 17 years, the average American male drives the distance to the moon), Morgan takes the reader from Miami to California via America's fast lane of dreams, into what he calls a love story, where "the affair is between us and our automobiles." The vehicle? A new silver Boxster on loan from Porsche, of course. The envious crowds soon form, and throughout the journey, Morgan wrestles with his new identity--going from a "two-van man" to a driver who regularly gets the approving thumbs-up.
Morgan's story is well-researched and intelligent, as well as introspective. He sets himself knowingly in the American literary genre of great road trips--among Kerouac, Steinbeck, Pirsig, Least Heat-Moon. But these authors all traveled back roads looking for America, Morgan notes. The America Morgan sought during his 47-day trek "was a moving target, one traveling faster than the speed of reason. The other real America." Along the way Morgan explores the changes the auto has brought to the country, and talks with urban planners, historians, psychologists, and scores of others. "For us," Morgan writes, "the beauty of a road trip is the travel that takes place inside ourselves.... we can drift into a place where we're finally the person we might have been, could be, maybe still will be if things work out right." As such, though the narrative is wonderfully entwined with Morgan's life, and the journey and its ponderings are truly his, they are also often ours--even if his speedy Porsche Boxster is not. --Byron Ricks
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