Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre at best
Review: I tried to write a review giving this book only one star, but apparently the Powers That Be don't want it's rating to drop that low. Let me try again. This book is long on attempted profundity and short on anything profound. The author clearly thinks the world of himself, but he doesn't have much to say and overwrites to compensate. I frankly can't fathom the positive review from another reader unless someone is flacking for the author to boost sales. I really wanted to like this book, and I was really disappointed. Don't waste your time. It has less to do with hobos than it does to do with the author's coming of age, but if this book is any indication he has a way to go yet.
Rating: 
Summary: A real disappointment
Review: I was all set to enjoy this book, but the author just didn't deliver. It's totally overwritten, and the author has very little to say, although he does seem to be particularly pleased with himself. That much comes through clearly. Very little else about his travels does.
Rating: 
Summary: A great chance to hop a train, or at least think about it.
Review: I've been around hobos and train hoppers for some time now. Living in Kansas City and Denver like I have you can get used to seeing the huge dirty freight trains roll by in the night to who knows where. Eddy Joe Cotton takes you on a trip aboard those trains, as a close friend would, so you can experience what it's like to look out from a box car as you roll though American heartland cities in the night. He wanders off and sobers up a bit near the end of the book, but that just makes the other 95% of it feel more real than any other train hopping book that I've ever read before. You'll never look at train tracks the same way after this honest and allegorical journal of one man's road less traveled is read.
Rating:
Summary: Riding the rails, skimming the surface
Review: It's difficult to review this book because I want so much to be able to say it is truly wonderful, refreshing and insightful. The idea behind the book is tremendous--a 20-something guy in the 21st century riding the rails. I hear that, and I'm hooked. I'm interested in how a person skirts the mandatory consumerism of today, interested in a kid who might think a little differently than most, and I'm drawn to stories of the vanishing American anti-dream. Unfortunately, Cotton's work seeks to be a part of mainstream America by consciously flouting it. But a conscious effort to deny the norm is simply a twisted respect for the norm. It has nothing to do with authentic choices; indeed, Cotton's narrative is forced and disingenuous. His voice is static and tries too hard to be what Cotton thinks a Hobo's voice should be. I have no doubt he knows what a Hobo's voice is, given his autobiography, but he has no idea how to get that onto the page. Sadly, my impressions were confirmed when I saw him read. His performance was filled with orchestrated dramatic pauses during which his band played (they were a decent junk band). But music can't accompany the book at all times, and the dramatic pauses Cotton wants to imply suffer due to one cliche following the other. If there is a fresh sentence in this book, it escaped me. What's not a cliche is a stilted metaphor, and what's not a metaphor is a flat description. The book is just an armchair traveler's book--easy observations, stilted prose. Alas.
Rating:
Summary: No style, no voice
Review: Reviews are typically written after reading an entire book, though some reviews--e.g. ones that are dismissive--are written after reading only the beginning ("I put this book down and could not pick it up"--Dorothy Parker).
An excerpt from Hobo was published in the San Francisco CHRONICLE magazine on 9 February 2003, touted as great work.
It would, one might think, have to be great work to be used in a major newspaper. But the material was so poorly written, so prolix, so lacking in a consistent voice (sometimes the voice of a reasonably educated person, often lapsing into 'hobosopeak') that it was profoundly dissatisfying.
Cotton must be some kind of magician or alchemist to have persuaded any publisher to support this sort of incompetent drivel. If one wants to read tales from the dark side, including the hobo life, check out William Vollmann's "The Royal Family" (see my review) to find a writer who communicates clearly in a consistent voice and engenders belief and empathy in the reader.
Vollmann writes about hobos with a clear eye.
Cotton can't haul the freight, based on reading the excerpt, and I am glad to have escaped without having to waste time and money on his complete book.
Rating: 
Summary: I AM NOT AN ANIMAL, I AM A HOBO!
Review: So what do you if you're nineteen, working with your father as a brickmason, and he fires you for sleeping on the job? Well, if you're Eddy Joe Cotton, you find the nearest truckstop, meet up with an old hand named Alabama, and jump a train. This memoir covers Cotton's first month on the tracks from Denver to Las Vegas as he meets up with old and young tramps, starlets, and murderers. Eddy Joe Cotton is a name made up by the author to be his "tramp" name. Hoboes don't look back at their past a lot and it's almost a ceremonial thing to leave your old name behind if you're a real traveller. There is a constant conflict inside Eddy. The conflict is between living the perilous, well, let's say precarious life of the hobo, and the American Dream. By American Dream I mean that slough of a nice house, car, wife, whatever. The life of freedom is one of loneliness and an avoidance of responsibility according to Cotton. Some would see this as a rejection of adulthood in a way. In some ways I agree. What's going to happen to Eddy when he gets old and he can't jump on a train? Who's gonna take care of him after all his wanderings? What is he truly gaining here? Of course Eddy rolls out the cliched "it's not the destination, it's the journey" hokey. I don't know, this book is sad in the same way that Jack Kerouac's books are sad. I mean, the longing to belong and live a normal life which can never be had by the writer. It's something that can threaten to overwhelm any happiness or at the least cast a shade on it. There is a lot of interesting information here, what with all the hobo jargon, and it really does make for a good adventure. Call me cynical but at some points I began to debate Eddy's credibility. I mean how do I know that this book is true? At times, his escapades have the feel of lies to me. The fact that I hold this book in my hand kinda ruins his credibility to me. For a man who doesn't want the materialistic and is supposedly a hobo, I'm sure he had to get an agent and make a book deal just like any other person. If you were a true "tramp", what would you want to publish a book for? Your concern should be with living, not with dredging up the past. I'm much more impressed with Jack Kerouac, who descended into alcholism and death BECAUSE he was famous, thereby proving the fact that he didn't want success and fame. While Hobo is entertaining and has good passages, I believe it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Rating:
Summary: The Hobo Poet is Yet Among Us
Review: The first thing that must be recognized by any reader of Hobo is that it's not a pure, unimpassioned historical narrative, not an unretouched photograph--nor was it intended to be. Art, by definition, never is. The reader who expects a tourist's snapshot of Saint-Rémy will be disappointed to discover they've stumbled upon something more akin to Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Anyone familiar with Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" will quickly grasp what they've gotten themselves into. I do not mean to imply, mind you, that Hobo is fiction, masquerading as an unadorned personal history. If you pick up Hobo with the motive of looking over the shoulder of a contemporary descendant of the depression era hobo, yearning to feel the warmth of his campfire without getting burned by it--in all honesty, that was my motive--you'll find your $12 to have been money well spent. Far more importantly, if you have the perspicacity to recognize what the author was attempting to convey, the value of goods received will transcend the notion of dollars and cents: by the energy of the author's poetic skills, you will see through his eyes: see the electric lights of a Nevada town whisking by; feel the heartache of parting with a friend, with the certain knowledge that you'll never see them again; taste the acid roadhouse coffee, left on the burner too long; absorb the overwhelming sorrow of being no one, at no place, with nowhere to go. The reviews here have run the gamut, from "pretentious bunk," to raves, to one bothered by the bizarre irrelevancy that the author must have, at one time, consulted a literary agent--as if Jack Kerouac had stood atop a literary Mt. Ararat and handed down stone tablets, never defiling himself with business of survival. Survival is a matter that Eddie Joe Cotton must surely have learned quite a bit about in his decade aboard boxcars. It is the unfortunate fate of the artist of innovation, and the courage required to come forth with it, that his or her leaps over stagnate lakes of human conformity will most likely go unrewarded. Not unlike those of Van Gogh's, the value of Eddie Joe Cotton's effort won't be recognized--if ever--until generations after the embers of his campfire have settled to cold ash.
Rating:
Summary: Moments of mastery; but few and far between.
Review: This autobiographical account of the beginning of a life of tramping in America had the potential to be a really interesting book. But, alas, that potential was missed. Here's a guy who went on to become a member of the Yard Dogs Road Show. Now, how did he get from being a tramp to there? You won't find out in this book. You only know about the Yard Dogs from captions of pictures that were taken sometime (Years? Months? It's impossible to know.) after the conclusion of this story. And he sets up by promoting that this is the story of his sojourn to Mexico, inspired by a picture post card. But he leaves us one month into the telling, as he concludes the book in a less than satisfactory way. Much less. And what makes it more frustrating, is that he has made us care about him and the other sidebar characters in the story. We do want to know more. And if he writes another book, I indeed will buy and read it. There are moments of pure poetic prose in this book reminiscent of William S. Burroughs, but without the gay sex, drugs, and profanity. These moments tell of his experiences in Nevada from Reno to Vegas. They are written so well with such colorful descriptions, it's almost as if someone else wrote this section of the book. And, maybe they did, because author Cotton goes out of his way to credit a very interesting character he meets -- Buckhorn Superstar -- for the help he gave him in writing this section. There is so much more for Cotton to tell us: more about the characters he meets, their background and outcome; the work he supposedly did along the way to keep himself in small change; his continuing experiences after he cuts us off; and how did he ever become a Yard Dog. Plus, how did he get a publisher to agree to print the ramblings of a tramp. This entire book could be edited down into four chapters and leave room for the telling of the rest of the story.
Rating:
Summary: A taste of very different life
Review: This book doesn't follow a satisfying chronological path, but the title is honest, a young man's thoughts not necessarily in perfect order but alive and compelling. The chapters are as entries in a diary and simple words create vivid images of a life totally alien to me and anyone I know. An intro...grandparents, father, mother, circumstance....starts it off, then he's off on the road following a father/son blowup.
We meet a bums and burnouts, hobos and waitresses and they are real people. He conveys the grit and flavor, the smell and grime to the reader. He's chasing a dream and I was cheering him on. Then plop...the book ends and there is no real conclusion. But the anecdotes are like stories on their own and offer some sense of closure. I was sorry that the narrative was over but I did not feel as though I were left hanging. More like someone was describing part of a life still in progress. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. It isn't profound or deep but it is colorful and engrossing.
Rating:
Summary: A taste of very different life
Review: This book doesn't follow a satisfying chronological path, but the title is honest, a young man's thoughts not necessarily in perfect order but alive and compelling. The chapters are as entries in a diary and simple words create vivid images of a life totally alien to me and anyone I know. An intro...grandparents, father, mother, circumstance....starts it off, then he's off on the road following a father/son blowup.
We meet a bums and burnouts, hobos and waitresses and they are real people. He conveys the grit and flavor, the smell and grime to the reader. He's chasing a dream and I was cheering him on. Then plop...the book ends and there is no real conclusion. But the anecdotes are like stories on their own and offer some sense of closure. I was sorry that the narrative was over but I did not feel as though I were left hanging. More like someone was describing part of a life still in progress. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. It isn't profound or deep but it is colorful and engrossing.
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