Charles Kuralt's America

Do I dare say anything bad about Charles Kuralt? He’s an all-American archetype: the folksy, smiling, roly-poly man of the people who ambles the country, finding a poet in every pea patch, a philosopher in every fen. When he recounted his life’s adventures in 1985’s On the Road With Charles Kuralt, it became a huge hit. For his new tome Charles Kuralt’s America, the former CBS newsman spent one month in each of 12 locations, starting with January in New Orleans and finishing up in New York City in December. The trouble is, while the previous book unpacked a lifetime’s trunkful of adventures, the new volume delivers a mere year’s worth of journeying. Not a heckuva lot happens. Reading his plain-as-potatoes prose, you hear his mellow TV voice, lulling you to glide over details (this is a good bedtime book). The strangers he meets, the conversations he relates, are all chummy, seldom threatened by complexity or drama. Kuralt himself is little prone to introspection. Even his father’s death sounds only a minor chord in the otherwise merry melody. He hardly mentions his wife, except to note that she pays off the tab he runs at his favorite restaurant. What did she do the rest of the year? Sit at home and pay his Visa bills?

But Kuralt’s fans probably don’t come to him for soul-searching insights. They seek what the dust jacket promises: a cheerful guide to an old-fashioned America, where the local diner still serves the best darn mock-apple pie and Connie the waitress can spin you a fine yarn about crazy Ely, who lived in a shack up the road a piece and knitted moose figurines out of kelp. And Kuralt delivers, with travels as comforting and bland as warm milk. B-