750cc Down Lincoln Highway

By Barroux and Bernard Chambaz

"I hate marathons. Hate running. An hour before the start, I received a text. Instead of 'Good luck,' it was 'We're finished.' So, I went to a bar next to the subway on 96th. Had a few bourbons with some other mope. Then I got on a bike and took off down the old Lincoln Highway." Forget Route 66. This is the original cross-country highway that takes you through REAL America, the first to cross all of the US from the Big Apple to the City on the Bay. This is THE road trip. On a 750cc bike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781681122465

Barroux

Born in Paris, Barroux spent much of his childhood in North Africa. He later attended art school in France, worked as an art director and then moved to New York and Montréal and has since worked in children’s illustration and press cartoons. He has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Forbes Magazine.

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Reviews for 750cc Down Lincoln Highway

[Tariq Pasalic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love it. Didn't expect this kind of book, but it was nice surprise. Documentary book, Travel book, Novel book... Everything in one...

[villemezbrown · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It seems everyone wants to do American travelogues along Route 66, so kudos to this French author for using a road less taken (in literature, anyway). The Lincoln Highway was one of the first transcontinental automobile routes and today basically consists of Route 30 from Pennsylvania to Wyoming and Interstate 80 on to San Francisco.At first glance, this looks like a memoir, but I believe it to be fiction or possibly a dramatization based on some actual events. There is no indication anywhere on the book, but at one point the narrator notes he was born in 1976, while the author Bernard Chambaz was actually born in 1949. (Maybe the illustrator is the basis for the story? I can't find his birth year.)Regardless, it's dull. Our French gentleman gets abruptly dumped via text and in his heartbroken daze rents a motorcycle (a 750cc Honda Shadow) to ride across the country and see the real America. Most of his stops get only one or two pages. Usually we are offered observations like how there's nothing African about Zulu, Indiana, except a Black man sweeping outside a church and how he didn't get to see any river rapids in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but his disappointment "doesn't diminish the pleasure of having passed by there." Sure.In this ode to the road and masculinity, his heartache does not keep him from turning his male gaze on several women and hitting on some of them. The point of this thin tome seems to be the healing power of travel and the other fish in the sea.You'd expect the art to at least carry the load in a travelogue, but it is not very detailed and barely transmits a sense of place or even the motorcycle. And the characters' noses are horrible.