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Book Review: Greasy Rider by Greg Melville

2008 at 5pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

I received this book from the Library Thing Early Reviewer program.

Publication date: October 7, 2008

When Greg Melville’s wife Ann Marie suggested the family should buy a diesel car and convert to vegetable oil, he was reticent, to say the least. But she managed to convince him:

“You’ll be the only guy on the block with a veggie car,” she argued. I didn’t care. “You’re always ranting about politics. Now you can walk the walk.” All right, I was listening. “You’ll save a lot of money.” Very good point. Then came the kicker. “Dick Cheney will hate you for it.” Done deal.

After realizing that converting vehicles to run on vegetable oil wasn’t just “something that only hippies do, when they’re not making their clothes out of hemp,” Melville cooks up the idea to drive his converted Mercedes from his home in Burlington, Vermont, across the country to the BioFuel Oasis in Berkeley, California. Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future is the story of that adventure.

Inspired by the travels of H. Nelson Jackson, the first person to drive cross-country in an automobile (he did it in 1903 and went west to east), Greg and his pal Iggy set out with a goal to cross the country fueled only by used fry-oil gathered from restaurants along the way (with a little help from fellow converted auto enthusiasts). They agree that since H. Nelson Jackson undertook his journey in response to a $50 bet that he couldn’t do it, Iggy would assign Greg errands inspired by their journey, and Greg would have one year afterward to complete the errands and win his own $50 bet.

Greg and Iggy’s cross-country journey takes only eight days, so to fill out the book, Melville’s chapters alternate between descriptions of the trip, one day at a time, and explanations of the errands and research he completed afterward to answer questions that came up along the way and satisfy the terms of his bet with Iggy. The travel chapters are funny and lighthearted, as Greg and Iggy negotiate the logistics of sharing space for 192 hours straight, and the writing is conversational and easy to enjoy. I loved it that Greg and Iggy invented a few words along the way: “blinkerbating” for flipping the broken turn signal up and down manually to make it flash and “redneck helmet” to describe a person wearing their sunglasses on top of their baseball hat. Greasy Rider reads similarly to a Bill Bryson book, but it is not quite as funny or compulsively readable. That isn’t to say it’s bad—Bill Bryson is just an awful lot to live up to.

The chapters describing Greg’s errands are interesting and informative. He travels to Nashville in search of the ultimate green home (Al Gore’s) and is disappointed to discover it’s not quite as earth-friendly as he’d hoped. His trips to a Minnesota farm (where he learns about wind energy) and to Dartmouth (where he learns about cullulosic ethanol) are a bit dry but are very educational—I learned several new facts about alternative energy sources and concluded that Greg’s errands were pretty worthwhile. I found it interesting, informative, and very timely when a researcher at Dartmouth told him that:

American foreign policy is largely dictated by protecting the resources we need, like oil. To kick the fossil-fuel habit by replacing it with a homemade solution is to strengthen national security.

The most interesting errand chapters describe a trip to the Google headquarters, where Melville is awestruck by the availability of expensive all-natural fruit juice and the extreme earth-friendliness that promotes employee well-being and is a very smart business move, and to Fort Knox, which is “one of the largest geothermally heated and cooled facilities in the world.” I was surprised to learn that.

A trip to a “green” Wal-Mart in McKinney, Texas, where the wind turbine in the parking lot stands as a solute to alternative sources of energy but doesn’t actually work, makes Greg and Iggy suspicious that “the green initiatives seemed more like a PR ploy than part of some new, sincere push by Wal-Mart to create a sustainable future,” and leads to a reflection on the open market and the ways in which business can profit by going green.

Greg and Iggy survive their journey and arrive at the Oasis with the car (mostly) in one piece, and Iggy assigns Greg his final task: to write a letter summarizing what he learned from the trip and from his errands. Greg sums it up this way:

It taught me that if two goobers like us can actually get in a car and drive across the country without fossil fuels or putting a lot of carbon into the air, the answers for sustainability are easier than people think.

He muses that

When the government musters the rare courage to act decisively on sustainability, the economy benefits as much as the environment does……

For too long, our country has tried to stop government from interference in big business, but ignored big business’s interference in government.

And he calls on likeminded individuals, stating that:

We need to inspire, educate, proselytize, and most important, mobilize so the country is equipped to face the inevitable challenges ahead.

I thoroughly enjoyed Greasy Rider. I was educated and informed, but I was also entertained. I was inspired by Greg and Iggy’s journey and their growing commitment to going green, and I liked that Melville presented many ways average Americans can apply the larger concepts to our daily lives. This is a great read for environmentalists and skeptics alike, as Iggy began the journey rather hesitantly and changed his mind along the way, and it would be a great introduction to or further reading on alternative sources of energy and what we can do to save the planet

So head over to the bookstore this Tuesday (walk or bike, if it’s close enough) and pick up Greasy Rider. Just be sure to bring along your resuable shopping bag. I give this one 4.5 out of 5.

Visit the author’s blog for more information.

Thank you to the Library Thing Early Reviewers program and Algonquin Books for this ARC.

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Comments

No Responses to “Book Review: Greasy Rider by Greg Melville”

Kathy on October 5th, 2008 5:54 pm

Sounds like a good one. I’m adding it to my wish list. You’re right – Bill Bryson is a lot to live up to.
fyreflybooks on October 5th, 2008 7:23 pm

Sounds like it was inspiring without being lecturing, which is always nice to find and can be rare! I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Jeane on October 5th, 2008 8:37 pm

Was all that vegetable-oil fuel from the restaurants free? Imagine, crossing the country without stopping at all those gas stations!
Rebecca on October 5th, 2008 8:47 pm

Jeane: Yep, it was all free. Most of the restaurants were happy to give it away and thought the project was very cool.
draabe on October 6th, 2008 6:08 am

Sounds good, especially since we don’t really need any lectures. (They tend to backfire!)
The Sunday Salon « The Book Lady’s Blog on October 12th, 2008 9:05 am

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