Overview
Leaving her home in Seattle in midsummer to drive "the long way round" to the Detroit auto show, Lesley Hazleton embarks on a five-month journey to visit the holy places for cars -- where they are raced, displayed, crashed, tested, and made -- as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles. Her quest takes her on a road trip that teaches her not only about cars and the peculiar passions of car lovers but also about herself. A committed environmentalist in thrall to the internal combustion engine, Hazleton explores her own worship of speed during assaults on the landspeed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats; negotiates the famed off-road Rubicon Trail across the Sierras; finds the exact spot where James Dean died in his Porsche Spyder; and attends a crash conference in Albuquerque, where her discovery that 'when metal and flesh collide, metal always wins' sheds light on our erotic fascination with the automobile. She crushes cars in a Houston junkyard; works the nightshift at the Saturn plant in Tennessee; and in Detroit, turns away from the glitz and gleam of new metal to watch what happens when a car is driven into a million pounds of concrete. Along the way she corresponds with a class of eight-year-olds, befriends a priest who fixes his parishioners' cars, and encounters people and places where cars are created, worshiped, celebrated, and even feared. Throughout her journey, Hazleton's ability to make us see and smell and hear what is unique about each place she visits keeps us riveted, eager to move on with her to the next town on the map.Halfway through this extraordinary adventure, Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes a journey of grief and memory, a deeply personal odyssey that after 13,000 miles almost costs her her own life on an ice-bound highway. What begins as a romance takes her deep into the heartland of obsession, evolving into a meditation on life and death as she delves into the soul of a nation and its machine.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewRoad Trip Extraordinaire
It's a peculiarly national thing, our American obsession with the road and with cars. The desire to hit the road and chase the horizon is part of our national psyche, and women feel it as strongly as men.
Look at Lesley Hazelton. Hazelton, a woman, a British expat who lives in Seattle, is automotive columnist for the Detroit Free Press. She knows all about cars — the romance, the danger, the need for speed — and she knows all about hitting the road. Witness her latest book, Driving to Detroit: An Automotive Odyssey.
Hazelton set out from Seattle in a Ford Explorer, heading for the annual Detroit Auto Show. She gave herself six months on the road, and she covered a lot of miles, passing through Salt Lake City, Tahoe, Pebble Beach, Malibu, Palm Springs, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Amarillo, Houston, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Nashville, and on northward to Detroit, with plenty of detours along the way, all of them auto-related.
Remember when Craig Breedlove tried to break the sound barrier at Bonneville Salt Flat in Utah? Hazelton was there, and everywhere else, from desert to downtown, including the Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, looking at some mighty pricey machinery, and the Autorama in Houston, an annual hot time for hot-rodders. She went to the places where they make cars — and where they break them, here witnessing high-tech crash tests, there operating a press that crushes cars into neat little packages. And for good measure, she visited the spot in California where James Dean died inhisPorsche Spyder.
And speaking of death...
After covering ten thousand miles or so and reaching her objective in Detroit, Hazelton headed due west in a straight line, then northwest toward her houseboat home in Seattle. And just three hours or so short of home, her car slid off a treacherously icy road, giving her some darker and more personal insights into our obsession with the automobile.
Less gripping is Hazelton's rather mawkish pondering of her father's illness and death in England, and her correspondence with a class of schoolchildren who followed her adventures on the road. This all sounds like the sort of thing editors make writers put in for a more human touch. But Driving to Detroit doesn't need embellishment of that sort. Hazelton's tale of hitting the road is lively, sometimes bumpy, and occasionally scary. There isn't a dull mile in it.
— Alan Ryan, barnesandnoble.com
Linda Niemann
Hazleton is an ambivalent interviewer of the mainstream car culture. What attracts her is the edge state of speed....While attracted to risk, Hazleton seems to be equally concerned with protection....We want to know more about her than Hazleton is willing or able, at this time, in this book, to tell us.—Women's Review of Books
Publishers Weekly -
Kerouac's Beat-bible meets the literary memoir in Hazleton's (Confessions of a Fast Woman) lively account of a six-month road trip across the American landscape. A British expat and car columnist for the Detroit Free Press seeking to map out an "automotive geography of America," Hazelton resolves to follow the most roundabout route from her home in Seattle to the annual Detroit Auto Show. Driving her Ford Explorer down unmarked paths and rocky sluices from state to state, she rubs elbows with a Catholic priest/mechanic, a hot-rod customizer named Big Daddy and an ominous armored car specialist. From the Sierra's treacherous Rubicon Trail to a family-run Texas junkyard and an eerie crash-testing site in Michigan, many of this quest's destinations are refreshingly unfamiliar. Less successful are Hazleton's attempts to wax philosophically on the erotica of speed and to patch together her book's episodic structure with childhood memories of a now-ill father. Without sounding righteous, Hazleton decries the loss of the natural landscape to lazy sightseers whose paved highways have invaded "every nook and corner of the national parks." While at times the material feels too flimsy to support the weight of autobiography, Hazelton remains a congenial guide, and her decision to remain more reportorial than confessional works to her advantage, making this a vivid portrait of the bizarre and hidden aspects of American car culture. (Oct.)Library Journal
Written by British-born but now Seattle-based automotive journalist Hazleton, this lively, knowing, and sympathetic look at the American fascination with cars has something for everyone. Hazleton travels the country in a pickup and drops in on such events as a car crash (injuries) conference, an off-the-road vehicle trek, car shows, the Bonneville Salt Flats, and the National Corvette Museum. She visits a company that armors vehicles for political leaders and celebrities and a junkyard where she gets to press the buttons on a machine that crushes cars. Appropriately, perhaps, the book ends with her crashing her truck on the last leg of her trip home. Car buffs may be annoyed by her detours to write about the death of her father and sending postcards to schoolchildren, but this popular treatment of an important aspect of our culture is a good choice for public libraries.--Harold M. Otness, Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., AshlandLinda Niemann
Hazleton is an ambivalent interviewer of the mainstream car culture. What attracts her is the edge state of speed....While attracted to risk, Hazleton seems to be equally concerned with protection....We want to know more about her than Hazleton is willing or able, at this time, in this book, to tell us. -- The Women's Review of BooksKirkus Reviews
Hazleton (automotive columnist for the Detroit Free Press and author of, among other works,Confessions of a Fast Woman) takes us on a journey into 'the heart, soul, and wallet of the enduring American obsession with the car.' The author is an unorthodox guide. Born British, a former psychologist, former political correspondent, an environmentalist, she is not the type of person one would expect to be bonkers about cars. She hits the road—a six-month journey from Seattle to the Detroit Auto Show, with countless detours along the way. She goes in search of the culture of cars; she finds it, for instance, at Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, where Craig Breedlove, at age 59, attempts (unsuccessfully) to break the sound barrier in a car. She finds it at Concours d'Elegance at Pebble Beach, Calif., where the super-rich display their multimillion-dollar autos. She finds it at Frog Todd's ABC Junkyard of Houston, Tex. What is it about cars?There is sexuality. (In a line that could be straight out of Raymond Chandler, she writes of one classic car: 'It had a sensuously chiseled sleekness, like the high cheekbones of a supermodel.') At high speeds, there is the sense of transgression, and always there is the illusion of power, of being in control of tons of metal, when we control little in our lives. There is the romance of death: It is cool to die in a crash, but only if you are young and in a hot car (her father's death, of natural causes, in England in the middle of her journey heightens her awareness of this foolish illusion). Would James Dean's legend continue if he had died in a Hyundai, she wonders.
Hazleton arrives at no grand conclusions here but in finelyetched vignettes reveals why we so dearly love our automobiles. An exceptional writer at the top of her game. A car book that is about a lot more than cars.