ENTERTAINMENT

lmost every chapter of William Least Heat-Moon's fourth travel book contains a sentence or a paragraph or an even longer passage that qualifies as a gem. Mr. Heat-Moon tells stories of places and people so well, and with such memorable language, that his books deserve a second reading, even with so many other worthy books still unread.

In short, Mr. Heat-Moon delivers quoz after quoz, that unfamiliar word in the book's title that he defines as "anything strange, incongruous or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious. It rhymes with Oz. To the traveler, it's often the highest quaesitum."

Certainly the journeys taken by Mr. Heat-Moon (born William Trogdon in Kansas City in 1939) and his wife Jo Ann (identified in Roads to Quoz by the letter Q) were not simple, or brief. Encompassing four seasons over a three-year span, the travels (mostly by automobile, once by boat) measured 16,000 miles to places, as he says, "a goodly portion of the American populace would call 'nowhere.' "

The travels do not add up to some sort of neatly concluded whole. In fact, the author offers a challenge to any reviewer (like myself, presumably) who attempts to "find a thesis in these pages." Such reviewers, Mr. Heat-Moon states, "will be summarily barred from their writing machines until able to state clearly and concisely the thesis of their lives."

To readers who already know Mr. Heat-Moon as the author of the 1982 book Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, no thesis is needed. Mr. Heat-Moon demonstrates such a sharp intelligence, relentless curiosity and fine phrasing that nothing more could be desired. Between Blue Highways and Roads to Quoz, Mr. Heat-Moon published two other travel books (PrairyErth and River Horse), not all that similar to the first or to the newest, but still fascinating.

(For what it's worth, PrairyErth is my favorite. Instead of going broad, Mr. Heat-Moon went deep, traversing about every inch of rural Chase County, Kan., on foot. I regularly use the word "masterpiece" when recommending it.)

Mr. Heat-Moon divided his Blue Highways travels into 10 sections, starting with "Eastward," moving through "West by Southwest" and ending with "Westward." Six sections take care of the journeys in Roads to Quoz, with the Arkansas-Louisiana axis dominating early and the Northeast section of the United States dominating later.

Roads to Quoz might be worthy of the word "masterpiece." I hesitate only because Mr. Heat-Moon irritates me with his multiple direct addresses to his readers, because he might be slipping into a show-off mode vocabulary-wise, and because his opening chapter about the letter Q might qualify as precious, and I don't mean in the positive sense of that word. Perhaps other readers will not find any of those quirks troubling.

Steve Weinberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Roads to Quoz

An American Mosey

William Least Heat-Moon

(Little, Brown, $27.99) Live from Austin

William Least Heat-Moon

appears 11. a.m. today at the

Texas Book Festival

in Austin. For live updates

from the festival, visit GuideLive.com/texaspages.