Long dark highways and thin white lines; fire roads and interstates; skeleton frames of burnt-out Chevrolets; barefoot girls sitting on the hoods of Dodges; pink Cadillacs; last-chance power drives; men who go out for a ride and never come back. Bruce Springsteen's lyrics have injected more drama and mystery into the myths of the US road than any figure since Jack Kerouac. He knows this, of course. So it's one of the running jokes in his big, loose, rangy and intensely satisfying new memoir, Born to Run, that he didn't begin to drive until well into his 20s - around the time he landed simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek.His brooding, violent father had been too impatient to teach him and anyway he couldn't afford a car. When Springsteen was forced to sneak behind the wheel, licenceless, to handle some driving on his earliest tours, his ineptitude terrified his band. He didn't exactly, when young and virile, ride through mansions of glory on suicide machines. He mostly stuck out his thumb. He'd been born to hitch."Every sort of rube, redneck, responsible citizen and hell-raiser the Jersey shore had to offer, I rode with 'em," he writes. Springsteen's songs are intensely peopled. Wild Billy and Crazy Janey, Johnny 99, Mary from Thunder Road Wayne from Darlington County, Jimmy the Saint and Bobby Jean had to come from somewhere. This book suggests Springsteen met many of them while cackling in the shotgun seat.The book is like one of Springsteen's shows - long, ecstatic, exhausting, filled with peaks and valleys. It's part séance and part keg party. His writing voice is much like his speaking voice; there's a big, raspy laugh on at least every other page. There's some raunch here. This book has not been utterly sanitised for anyone's protection. Most importantly, Born to Run is like his finest songs, closely observed from end to end. His story is intimate and personal, but he has an interest in people, a gift for sizing them up. Springsteen's father was a frequently unemployed bus driver, among other blue-collar jobs; his mother a legal secretary. They were fairly poor. In their houses there was generally no telephone and little heat. Meals were cooked on a coal stove. Born to Run is potent on the subject of social class.Springsteen got his first guitar, a rental, after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show . He had a serious work ethic and went on to play in a string of well-regarded bands with names like Child and Earth and Steel Mill.He writes that he's never thought much of his singing voice. As good a guitar player as he is, others were better. It was his songs, he realis ed early, that would have to put him over the top.The words were apparently just there, on tap. And they stayed there, even when his lyrics became pared down.Born to Run takes us, album by album, through his career. The chapters sometimes feel clipped and compressed, as if he's put the data in his heart on to a thumb drive.The book takes us through his many stabs at romance, which tended to end badly. (He once gave his father the crabs after they'd shared a toilet seat.) He details the failure of his first marriage to actress Julianne Phillips and the success of his second to Patti Scialfa, who sings in his band.He raised his three children without rock-star mementos. "My kids didn't know Badlands from matzo ball soup," he writes. "When I was approached on the street for autographs, I'd explain to them that in my job I was Barney [the purple dinosaur] for adults." His eldest son says, in shock: "Dad, that guy has you tattooed on his arm."His work ethic has never abandoned him . "I'm glad I've been handsomely paid for my efforts," he writes, "but I truly would have done it for free." - © The New York TimesBook Bites$35 000 - the asking price for a letter written by US President George Washington in 1786. Written from his family estate, Mount Vernon, the letter is described by The Guardian as 'a slice of racy agricultural correspondence', dealing with the sale of a female donkey. According to seller William Reese, Washington wrote more than 30000 letters in his lifetime and prices for them have ranged from thousands of dollars to close to a million, depending on their content.James Patterson - the blockbuster author announced that he has called off his planned book 'The Murder of Stephen King'. Patterson said he had decided not to write the book about a deranged fan who tries to kill the horror master after learning that real-life fans had 'disrupted the King household in the past'.The Book Lounge in Cape Town - where Terry Bell will be in conversation with Thula Simpson at the launch of Simpson's book 'Umkhonto We Sizwe' this evening at 6pm. - Tymon Smith..