Bob Arnold American Train Letters 1995 239 pp Nonfiction
	Back cover by Lyle Glazier: "Out of old words burnished into a new vocabulary, Bob Arnold's American Train Letters travels a network around the perimeter of the United States from New England to Washington to Florida to New Orleans to San Francisco to board the Zephyr back across the continent to Salt Lake City and Rugby, North Dakota (the "geographical center" not of the United States but "of North America"), to Minneapolis to Chicago to Albany and, instead of continuing down the Hudson, veering east toward Boston and home to Vermont. "Along the route are frequent descents into cities and small towns and the rural countryside to look at people and places through the eyes of a young husband and young wife whose vision is renewed by revisiting familiar places and viewing new ones in the company of their seven year old son, for whose enrichment the trip is undertaken. The journey is a family On the Road without the booze and drugs of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac but with a similar high tension of discovery. "The author's monologue is enriched with flashes into Native American history, Spanish and French explorations, and a knowledge of American poetry, pottery, painting and music, but the heart of the book is to pit the rhythm of a modern polyglot society against the vastness and grandeur of a landscape that dwarfs the worst and the best that human beings have made of it. The vision being shared with us and with the young boy who is indispensable to the journey is at once humanitarian and deeply personal: 'like a fool I fell in love with my country.'" In print from Longhouse.

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