SOURCE: "They See America Rolling," in The New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1993, pp. 1, 22.

In the following review, Clines praises Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century as full of "wit, discovery, and self-deprecation."

In their separate careerings in time among American epiphanies, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac went beyond self-concoction to achieve an originality that made it all look easy: hit the road, get to the core, bang us in the heart with words that access the routine beauty and pain of daily life. Their work remains so readable and so indelibly American that it's no wonder that fresh attempts at wandering the nation and mapping its presumptive soul go forward with the inevitability of book advances.

Lately, a formula seems to be overtaking much of the wandering. It often features a narrator using the internal combustion engine as Muse, with highway subbing for plot...