BLUE HIGHWAYS: A Journey Into America ...

BLUE HIGHWAYS: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat Moon (Houghton Mifflin: $9.95, illustrated). In this engaging memoir, William Least Heat-Moon leaves a failed marriage and the prospect of unemployment in Missouri to roam the back roads and highways of rural America, visiting flyspeck towns for their odd names: Dime Box, Texas; Nameless, Tennessee; Whynot, Mississippi; Brooklyn Bridge, Kentucky. He chats with waitresses, students, pilots and farmers, recording their stories in plain, unaffected prose, as comfortably worn as the Amerindian and Shaker relics he admires. Moon’s occasional efforts to add a veneer of sociological analysis to his search for the remains of a simpler time in America lack depth. He’s really a storyteller, in the tradition of his Southern and Native American ancestors, and his nostalgic, down-by-the-old-mill-stream-of-conscious-ness travelogue offers pleasantly diverting reading.