Editorial Reviews
Product Description
The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. But nowhere in American literature, until now, has a left-wing economist hit the road, observing and interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, bringing out its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight. Disillusioned with academic life after thirty-two years teaching economics, Michael D. Yates took early retirement in 2001, with a pension account that had doubled during the dot.com frenzy of the late 1990s. He and his wife Karen sold their house, got rid of their belongings, and have moved around the country since then, often spending months at a time on the road. Michael and Karen spent the summer of 2001 in Yellowstone National Park, where Michael worked as a hotel front-desk clerk. They moved to Manhattan for a year, where he worked for Monthly Review. From there they went to Portland, Oregon, to explore the Pacific Northwest. After five months of travel in Summer and Fall 2004, they settled in Miami Beach. Ahead of the 2005 hurricane season, they went back on the road, settling this time in Colorado. Cheap Motels and a Hotplate is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating examination of work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.
|
Customer Reviews Read 8 more reviews...
boring June 10, 2008
Blah (phx)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Boring
Need better editing. Good nuggets of writing buried in pompous blather.
Need more concise editing
Don't waste your time and money May 19, 2008
Leroy Landry (Harlem, NY)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I had to read this book for class and it was a complete waste of time. I don't understand why this guy is driving around the U.S. in a minivan if he calls himself an environmentalist and if he is so unhappy with the U.S., why don't he just move the Cuba. But besides the questions I have about this book, I still think it is not worth reading. He provides detailed descriptions of what he and his wife does on their trips like we should care. If you would like to know about a place's demographics, tourist attractions, culture, socioeconomic status, and so on, there is something free to everyone called the internet. Please do yourself a favor and forget about this book.
Interesting Reading October 7, 2007
P. Eftink
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book focuses on specific areas of the country, giving personal views of the beauty or ugliness of each place and of how income and lifestyle affect them. It gave some statistics to back up the author's perceptions. Reading his personal experiences in traveling through and living in the many places held my interest throughout the book.
HOT TRAVELOGUE AND A CHEAP CULTURE August 5, 2007
SOUTHERN MAN (SOUTH - CALIF)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Michael Yates has discovered America and its not the glossy, star-spangled, fantasy-culture blasted at you 24/7 by the corporate infotainment state. This is the America of cheap motels and low-wage service economy jobs, from Yellowstone National Park to Miami Beach to Portland to Pittsburgh. "Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate" is literally an on the ground report from the front lines of America as actually seen and experienced by a working class son of the Sixties and former college economics professor, who knows a cheap con when he sees it.
Yates incisive American travelogue is a panoramic, coast to coast exploration of the scarred beauty and turbulent history of our once great nation. It's a searing economic expose of the relentless commercial onslaught of the last forty years on our people, our land and our democracy, resulting in a growing class inequality unprecedented in American history. If Michael Moore was a travel writer, this is the book he would have written. -- Ron O'Brien, Contributer, Free San Francisco: The Ultimate Free Fun Guide to the Bay Area
A highly enjoyable read from cover to cover. August 4, 2007
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue is the memoir of economics professor Michael D. Yates, who set off together on a journey across America. As they traveled, they observed sights and human efforts ranging from a program meant to reverse the privatization of national parks and forests to the political economy of California agriculture which relies heavily on migrant workers to pick food, to a savvy look at the job market in Portland. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is not a motel or eatery guide for vacationers per se, but rather an assembly of insights sure to intrigue and captivate armchair travelers. A highly enjoyable read from cover to cover.
|
