The Distance to the Moon: A Road Trip into the American Dream

by James Morgan

An evocative celebration of the American love affair with the automobile chronicles the author's odyssey across America, from Florida to Oregon, by car and the people and places he encountered along the way. 30,000 first printing.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

281 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 1999

About the author

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Reviews

[Reed Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was a two for. One part on cars. One on Americana. Americana was ok . The car part was boring.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book in another life. John Updike wrote that the average American male drives the distance to The Moon, 238,000+ miles every 17 years. I have not read any Updike, other than some short stories but I will when I get around to reading his two Pulitzer Prize winners, "Rabbit Is Rich"(1982) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990.) The author did his road trip into The AMerican Dream in a Porsche Boxer. I recently got a new Volvo, retiring my 2001 V70 with 252,463 miles in 15 years so luckily I am on my way back to Mother Earth.

I have a head full of quandary with the whole American obsession with automobility. Don't get me wrong, I love a road trip. I rail constantly about fossil fuel consumption and our incestuous relationship with the Middle East. We have destroyed the American city to accommodate the car, by designing for roads over people. So I think it is ironic, as I view the videos of the Fort McMurray, Alberta fire consuming the landscape while at the same time the 80,000+ people are fleeing the conflagration in their cars and trucks! I have seen several references to statements by experts that the severity and size of the fire is directly attributable to climate change. And burning fossil fuels - oil/gasoline/jet fuel/kerosene/propane adds an outrageous amount of CO2 tonnage to the air everyday. So what to do? "Will the future understand.....how much of our lives was spent in automobiles, and how largely their little curved caves of painted metal, speeding through the landscape of imploring advertisements and commercial desolation, and the powerful instant responses of their knobs and pedals, and the fine points of their amenities and costliness, and their aura of controlled explosions were part of our coming of age, of mating, our fulfillment of obligations, our thrusts of dreaming? An average American male became a man at the age of 16, with his possession of a driver's license, and every 17 years....." ~ John Updike. Perhaps we should be encouraged that the number of teenagers getting a license has been declining.

[Coralie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started off good, but got old about midway through, probably like the road trip itself. James Morgan is a magazine writer who had an idea. If Porsche would loan him a car, he would take it across the country and write a book about the trip. They actually went for it and loaned him a Boxter, a new model of Porsche not available to the general public. He went on his trip and this was the resulting book. It got a New York Times Best Book Award, but I thought it had its drawbacks. It just wasn't that interesting to read a whole book about a guy, sticking to the interstates on purpose, who drives across the country while engaging in a long distance fight with his wife back home, who was understandably irritated that he was doing this, although in the end he probably made lots of money selling his book. There were interesting parts. Often I feel that books written by magazine writers would have been better as a magazine article, and I feel that about this one.

[Karla Kitalong · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kind of memoir about the car culture of the U.S. It was fast reading and relatable for those of us who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.