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The Distance to the Moon: A Road Trip into the American Dream | 
 enlarge | Author: James Morgan
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $24.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 1602990
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 285
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 157322135X
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.30492
EAN: 9781573221351
ASIN: 157322135X
Publication Date: May 10, 1999
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Condition: Free bookmark with every order. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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
Book 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 no matter where you go there you are February 27, 2007
I remember reading this book and thinking how interesting it would be; but I found his comments a bit grating after a while. I'm sure it was a terrific trip, but I feel this might have been more judiciously edited.
 Better than I thought February 25, 2007
I was initially worried that this book would be too much about the car and not enough about the road...or Florida for that matter. It seemed as if the book took FOREVER just to get out of Florida. I was also worried that this book would be too much of a male fantasy. Luckily that part turned out not to be true and made for enjoyable reading.
But once the author got into Utah and places north and west of there things picked up. He met interesting people in bar and restaurants, saw a few oddities along the way.
The author unwinded as the journey continued. He talked about his previous cars, his previous wife and his previous jobs. Strife between his current wife was obvious from the start and I wonder if this trip was an excuse to mull over the end of his marriage. One never finds out.
The trip ended upruptly on the west coast. I thought it was a bit of a letdown; perhaps disillusionment seeped in and the author resided to his fate. He dropped off the Porsche in Portland and the love story with the car was over.
 A Roadtrip into Middle-Aged Hornliness October 6, 2003
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
We've all seen this guy at a stoplight and cringed. Ballcap pulled down to conceal creeping baldness, wraparound sunglasses in place to allow maximum "leerage," arm propped self-consciously atop the steering wheel -- a reminder that adulthood for some is just a sad continuation of high school, a pathetic attempt to prove one's sexual desirability by dressing the part. The saddest aspect of this ego trip are those left behind, particularly the author's third(!) wife, who clearly recognizes (present tense) that she can't trust him around other women -- women he approaches throughout the text as "possible scores." Gross book.
 Fussing and Fretting Across the USA January 13, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Here's the life lesson this book confirmed: if you're going to share a long road trip with a companion and a car, best select both carefully. The Porsche Boxster featured in this book is obviously a primo vehicle for the journey. Alas, James Morgan is not the companion of choice, and this book -- whose premise of a Interstate journey from Miami to Portland atttracted me to it -- lost a star about every fifty pages. Ruminating on whether Americans as a people (and we are basically talking men here -- women exist mostly as ornaments impressed by cars) long most for the open road or the comforts of home, Morgan tells car stories, but not enough of them or particularly interesting ones. He worries about the designs of people he meets along the way and how much he spends on the motels where he stays. Earrings, scruffy beards, long straggly hair on those he meets seem to evoke in him images of horrors about to be inflicted on his person, although these folk invariably offer him kindness both small and large. Frequent flashbacks to his adolescence -- wink, wink -- hint strongly at the seductive qualities of cars he owned in his early driving years. He quarrels with his wife before embarking from Miami and too many pages are spent alluding to this quarrel (details of which are never shared) and the in-trip visit and numerous telephone calls that only seem to exacerbate it. On the evidence of this book, Morgan's trip brought more bother than pleasures or answers, and he writes of it with prose that is neither original or engrossing. My advice: don't subject yourself to his angst. Instead, take a fast car out for an open road run.
A car buff shares his love of the Boxster June 14, 2001
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
James Morgan describes driving a Porsche Boxster from Miami to St. Louis to Portland to San Francisco. Morgan seems like the sort of person who experiences life as a series of car stories, and during the journey, he tells his life history with an emphasis on the automotive angle. The pivotal part of his road trip is in Portland, Oregon, which is famous for its anti-car, pro-transit policies that are known as the "new urbanism." Morgan attacks the new urbanists, and wonders why anyone would choose to stand on a windy rain-drenched street waiting for the bus when they could be driving their own car instead. It's particularly ironic when Portland planning specialists use contorted rationalizations to explain why they drive to work instead of taking the public transit that they're forcing down the throats of their fellow residents.Morgan writes well, if you don't mind the autobiographical element overpowering the travel narrative. However, he's a dyed-in-the-wool car buff writing for other car buffs. Unless you're the sort of person who loves talking about cars, you may have difficulty connecting with this author.
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