In this age of supercomputers and the internet, with ipods ubiquitous - music on the go, and airplanes criss-crossing the globe and shrinking distances; sure the book could use with an update but Jack Kerouac still manages to capture the essence of the feelings and pangs of loneliness which inevitably strikes lone travelers on long trips.

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak on the old sounds of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."