"Pure delight, a pungent potpourri of places and people interspersed with bittersweet essays on everything from the emotional difficulties of growing old to the reasons why giant sequoias arouse such awe."
–The New York Times Book Review"Profound, sympathetic, often angry . . . an honest moving book by one of our great writers." –The San Francisco Examiner
"This is superior Steinbeck–a muscular, evocative report of a journey of rediscovery." –John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate
"The eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed." –Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly