Book review: “The Lincoln Highway”

Michael Wallis and Michael S. Williamson‘s new book, “The Lincoln Highway” (320 pages, $39.95), earns the highest praise I can think of: It made me want to jump in the car and see that 3,400-mile historic road for myself.

The book, subtitled “Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate,” likely will spur the same type of tourism revival for the Lincoln Highway that Wallis’ best-selling “Route 66: The Mother Road” did for Route 66 when it was published in the early 1990s. Other books about the Lincoln have been published, but never with such an established author, a Pulitzer-winning photographer and the publicity might of a major publishing house, W.W. Norton.

And it’s a handsome volume, too, with colorful graphics, smooth layout and the terrific photography of Williamson. He seems to have an exquisite timing with the shutter. Historic buildings often are bathed in the golden light of sunset. In one instance, a paper boy is seen making his rounds in front of the Lincoln Highway Trading Co. in Carroll, Iowa, as if it were a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting.

Wallis’ meaty text combines fascinating historical nuggets with travelogue details as he motors west along the Lincoln Highway’s 12 states. Here’s an excerpt from Nevada:

Tippett Ranch is now a phantom place, but it is worth a visit. It is deathly still, with only the occasional sound of rusty corrugated tin rattling in the wind — except when the big cottonwoods are in leaf and the foliage creates a liquid whisper. The name Tippett stands out in raised letters over the door of the vacant ranch house. The aroma of sagebrush has replaced the smells of ranch life. Ducks splash on a stock pond, and in the soft mud are the tracks of deer and antelope. At the water’s edge is a stump with a branch shaped like the thumb of a hitchhiker who will never get a ride.

“The Lincoln Highway” begins a bit sluggishly in the New York and New Jersey chapters. Then the travelogue blossoms with the discovery of the Lincoln Garage (“Don’t Cuss, Call Us”) just across the Jersey border in Langhorne, Pa. One gets the impression that the Lincoln Highway also blossoms when it exits cramped urban areas and stretches its legs in the hinterlands. After that, the book purrs like a well-maintained Packard clear to the San Francisco Bay.

The Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental road when it was formed in 1913, is widely regarded as “The Father Road,” and this book shows why. I found myself wanting to get a fill-up at the fabulous Art Deco-style Dunkle’s Service Station in Bedford, Pa. I wanted to eat a slice of pie from Gene “The Chester Pie Man” Amos in Chester, W. Va. I wanted to browse the piled-high merchandise at Smith Brothers General Store in Clinton, Iowa. I wanted to bed down in a room at the Hotel Nevada in Ely.

Comparisons of “The Lincoln Highway” to “Route 66: The Mother Road” are inevitable, and a bit unfair. Indeed, the Lincoln Highway book doesn’t contain the side stories about the characters who inhabit the road like the seminal Route 66 volume did. But Wallis had driven and researched Route 66 for years before the book was published. He had mere months to prepare the Lincoln Highway volume.

Still, “The Lincoln Highway” is a more than worthwhile edition to any roadie’s library, and probably will inspire others to search out other treasures on our nation’s two-lane roads.

Highly recommended.

(Note: “The Lincoln Highway” is scheduled to be in bookstores July 9. Most online bookstores are already shipping it.)