“[W]hen Jaffe hits his stride, the result can be illuminating and entertaining. … In a delightful final chapter, Jaffe cruises the road’s remnants in a Mini Cooper like an archaeologist, seeking old taverns and milestones. As Jaffe observes in a graceful passage, landscape features like the Boston Post Road end up ‘not so much a place one can visit but the idea of a place, the idea that something special took place, here.’ ”
—Joseph Berger, New York Times

“The ‘king’s best highway,’ later known fondly as the Post Road and eventually as U.S. Routes 1 and 20, began as a series of Indian paths wending their way from Boston to New York City. Eric Jaffe, an agreeable guide, travels this multibranched highway through four centuries to provide an episodic history of roads and their ramifications. … In his final chapter, Mr. Jaffe rises to poetry. … Somewhere, it seems, America took a wrong turn on the Post Road. Whether we can retrace our route and find the better way is a really good question.”
—Bill Kauffman, Wall Street Journal

“Early in the writing of The King’s Best Highway, Eric Jaffe tells us, an advisor warned him not to make a book about a road ‘boring as hell.’ Never has advice been more scrupulously followed: there is not a boring word in the book, which from beginning to end is consistently surprising, entertaining, and amusing. The author deftly leads us along the road from New York to Boston, taking us past the infant stagecoach lines, the first fires of Revolution, Abraham Lincoln figuring out his Presidential campaign and the armies that followed once he’d won it, the brief hegemony and slow withering of the railroad, the decidedly mixed blessing of the interstate. On the way we encounter such diverse figures as P.T. Barnum and J.P. Morgan, Robert Moses and Franklin Roosevelt and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. It makes for a most enjoyable party. A valuable one, too, because Jaffe sets forth a persuasive case that the old Post Road runs through us all, and his scores of lively set-pieces coalesce into the tremendous story, told at once intimately and spaciously, of the rise of American civilization.”
—Richard Snow, A Measureless Peril

“The name of it may be the Boston Post Road but in Eric Jaffe’s hands it becomes more like the Rosetta Stone—a way of decoding American history from British colony to 21st century polyglot. The King’s Best Highway is a journey through the centuries as well as the miles, traveling from John Winthrop to Robert Moses. Any reader interested in history will be delighted to join Eric Jaffe on the ride.”
—Samuel G. Freedman, The Inheritance

“If you’ve ever lived near or driven on U.S. Route 1 (aka the Boston Post Road), you will be enthralled by Jaffe’s (no relation) account of American history through the lens of this landmark highway. From its origins as a Native American trail through its near replacement by 19th-century railroads to the rise of the interstate system (I-95, anyone?), the Post Road has registered signal changes in American life, and its story is told engagingly.”
—Sonia Jaffe Robbins, Publisher’s Weekly
2010 Summer Reading Staff Pick

“Jaffe’s paean to this roadway, which began as a series of Indian paths and over time became a pair of US highways, offers not just a history of an important Northeastern thoroughfare but represents a kind of lens through which the reader can follow the development of America over four centuries.”
—Michael Kenney, Boston Globe

“[Jaffe] reveals that the road sprang from the consolidation of several Indian trails and details such developments as railroads and canals, as well as bigger highways to accommodate the explosion of the automobile in popularity, including present-day Route 1. … And the importance of the road is an intriguing companion to the usual wars-and-elections stuff of history.”
—Rick Massimo, Providence Journal

“The Boston Post Road, writes the author, is best envisioned as “a lasso tossed from Manhattan toward the Bay, its knot landing at New Haven, wrangling southern New England.” With a purpose larger than pinpointing a particular path, he tells a three-pronged tale about transportation, commerce and communication that stretches over four centuries. Jaffe examines the ancient Indian footpaths followed by colonial messengers who wore a trail through the wilderness sufficiently established to support regular mail service by 1673. The muddy, rutted paths had by 1789 become a “loosely pebbled splendor” later trumped by turnpikes and expressways. The “King’s best highway,” once the conduit for quill-penned letters and newspapers that galvanized the American Revolution, by the 1990s featured cell-phone towers above and fiber optic wires beneath. Famous names—Winthrop, Franklin, Adams, Washington, Revere, Lincoln, FDR, P.T. Barnum—figure prominently here, but most interesting are the sketches of lesser-known characters who contributed to the highway’s legend. These include Levi Pease, the stagecoach entrepreneur and “Father of the New England Roads”; Samuel Slater and Francis Lowell, whose carding machines and power looms fueled the Northeastern industrial explosion; Albert Pope, bicycle manufacturer and agitator for better roads and highway reform; Hiram Maxim, who engineered Pope’s bicycles into horseless carriages that briefly turned the area into the world’s automotive center; and Lester Barlow, whose revolutionary idea for expressways transformed the corridor forever. Jaffe provides revealing anecdotes about the postal service’s emergence, the vogue for turnpikes, the region’s short-lived canal fever, the Boston-New York rivalry, the underrated importance of the bicycle craze, the railroad empire’s rise and fall and the political battles pitting people against highways. An unusual, often delightful piece of cultural history.”
—Kirkus Book Reviews

“It’s America’s oldest highway. It connects Boston with New York. Chances are, you’ve driven on it. It’s the Boston Post Road, and chances also are that you don’t know the fascinating history of this important route that began as pathways for Native Americans, became a system of mail delivery routes and today is a heavily traveled thoroughfare that passes through Hartford, New Haven and other Connecticut towns.”
—Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant

“I’ve been watching Deadwood a lot, so reading about olde timey post roads with lost histories appeals.”
—Justin Moyer, Washington City Paper, “Five Books I’d Read”

“On its face, the history of a road hardly seems an engaging topic for a book. Eric Jaffe makes it fascinating. … Jaffe brings alive an era when all travel was local, and recreational voyages nearly unheard of.”
—Amanda Jane, Westchester Guardian (pdf here)