The Last Picture Postcard. - Review - book review

Reason, Jan, 2001 by Lynn Scarlett

This is the America that McMurtry seems to like pretty well. He marvels that sexploitation films from the early '70s could show up at an Amoco truck stop in the middle of nowhere (and he seems highly conversant with their contents). He gets a big uplift from the American creativity embedded in a handmade sign on a wall in Sheyenne, North Dakota. The sign says, simply, "Nothing was ever lost through enduring love of North Dakota." McMurtry is no romantic. He doesn't pretend to love Sheyenne, or North Dakota for that matter. But he does feel gladdened by the sign, because someone felt that way about North Dakota and put it in words on a wall.

Lynn Scarlett (lynns@reason.org) is vice president for research at the Reason Foundation.

Roads: Traveling America's Great Highways, by Larry McMurtry, New York: Simon & Schuster, 208 pages, $25