Meditations on America: John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee Series and Other Fiction

by Lewis D. Moore

Meditations on America explores John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, with special emphasis on MacDonald's examination of the conflicts and joys of twentieth-century American culture and society.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Steven]

This one is a bit of a mess. The chapters are topics: Learning and Knowing, Tradition and Change, Money and Choice, etc. - eighteen of them. And then within each chapter Moore quotes from passages in whatever Travis McGee book contains something that suggests McGee's attitude on that topic. So as you can imagine it is all over the place. I guess the intent was to create a composite view of how MacDonald used McGee to reveal his views on America. And by the end of the book you will have that composite view. Have to say though that it really just reads like a bunch of cobbled together notes. Kind of like a dissertation that never got tamed into a tightly argued thesis. Plenty of hard work went into this and there is a wealth of good examples, but overall it is just hard to read and I wish it had been given one more editorial review focusing on structure. Something simple like a summary paragraph (here's what you will learn in this chapter) to start each chapter would have paid huge dividends. The 2 stars is for delivery, the content is worth more than that.