Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey
Starred Review. It was almost a decade ago that Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) followed the trail of Lewis and Clark inRiver Horse; in the first section of his latest peripatetic writings, he and his wife, Q, trace the lesser-known Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 through the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase, searching out the head of the Ouachita River in Arkansas. Least Heat-Moon's fans will find this territory, and that covered in the five other journeys to places a goodly portion of the American populace would call 'nowhere,'  instantly familiar, as he and various companions take digressive paths from one small opolis (where anything metro was clearly missing) to the next in search of quoz (an 18th-century word meaning anything out of the ordinary). Among his many adventures, Least Heat-Moon rides a bicycle along an abandoned railroad track, discovers a road to nowherebuilt by a Florida county so local drug smugglers would have a landing strip, and comes up with what he believes is the real story behind the murder of his great-grandfather. Or maybe the highlights of these journeys are the people he meets along the way and their stories, like the man who tried to fund a school for disadvantaged children by providing lonely widows with special massages, or the artist who's turned his cabin into a walk-in kaleidoscope. Either way, few readers will be able to resist tagging along.(Oct. 29)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.