One might see similarities between artist Jackson Pollock and novelist Jack Kerouac, but it takes a stretch to add U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower as the third leg of a 1950s creative innovation stool. In 2005, when the original 120-foot 1951 manuscript scroll of Kerouac's On the Road was displayed next to Pollock's 20-foot painting Mural in the University of Iowa Museum of Art, adjacent to the Iowa I-80 spur of Eisenhower's 41,000-mile 1956 National Highway Act interstate system, Riley Hanick made just such a leap. In Three Kinds of Motion, a cornucopia of personal meditation, history, criticism and philosophy, Hanick (Murray State creative writing professor and Iowa MFA graduate) weaves the artistic and historical motivations of the major works of these three mid-century giants into an innovative creation of his own.
With tidbits of early criticism of On the Road ("typing") and Mural ("painting with a broom") mixed with his own experiences ("after reading him in high school... Kerouac had become embarrassing to me") and even the history of road-building design and materials (including architect Louis Kahn's comment about his favorite material: "Concrete really wants to be granite but can't quite manage"), Hanick's Three Kinds of Motion is a captivating reading adventure. Whether he is describing Ike's participation in the Transcontinental Convoy of 1919 or jumping ahead to Iowa City's great flood of 2008 that nearly destroyed the museum (FEMA declared it "not to have been damaged enough to warrant the funding of its demolition"), Hanick's curiosity and reflections make for an entertaining road trip. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.