Jack London was revered, celebrated and widely translated in Soviet Russia, as were Twain and Hemingway. All three were framed as anti-capitalist, and also (this is particularly true of London) as celebrants of/ adventurers in a Rousseau-esque natural wilderness. I never knew that London rode the rails, or that Hemingway wrote about it, and also Vollmann makes a good case that Twain's Mississippi boat rides were experiences parallel to the tracks.

I have never ridden a train in America (as opposed to the hundred or so rides I took in Russia to weekends in my grandmother's village and to vacations on the Black and Azore seas.) I associated trains with the Soviet Union, with public transportation, and with a particular outmoded idea of technological progress, with romance, and also with a nostalgia, from which I had been cut off.

Trains in America belong entirely to the past, but I did not know which past until Vollman's book. Having read it, I know that the past has a literature, a politics, a sociology, and a society of people that while it persists, has changed drastically and specifically.

Also, in Vollmann's descriptions of his train travels I see parallels to things I have seen or mind states I have experienced on long drives in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

Vollman has given me back the trains of my childhood, or rather, he gave me a way to understand the trains of America through signals I can interpret: literary, historical, sociological and panoramic.

This will sound silly, and overly grand, but the book reassures me that there is an American past. Does that make sense?

A lot of smart people--and one of my best friends--have recommended this book to me, but your comment(s) above sold me, Dmitry. Thanks--smart, engaging reading. Wish you'd been hired out to do the NYTimes review.