I really wanted to like this book a lot, and there were many very good passages — discussing the history of mules or the tendency to litter among the original pioneers. But there were also several aspects that kept this from being great. Buck seemed to get bored with the trip after leaving Wyoming and only writes sparingly about the trip across Idaho and Oregon. He frequently attempted to make the trip somehow significant to his relationship with his long-dead father. These passages rarely made sense to me and, in the end, Buck himself admitted that nothing had changed. So why clutter the book? His liberal politics came out frequently. He took digs at various political views and, especially, denominations. But at some level he seems to be searching because he would almost immediately pull back and admire something or other about believers before finally just saying that it's all made up so it doesn't matter. But the most annoying part of the book is that neither Buck or his brother are apparently capable of completing a sentence without foul language. If they did manage a complete thought without swearing, they'd make up for it by swearing two, three, four or more times in the next sentence. There were frequent sentences that consisted almost entirely of profanity. It added nothing to the story and convinced me that, while the journey the brothers took was very cool. I would not want to have to do it in their company.