I said in my review of the first book in this series that The Dark Tower series was fundamentally an American epic. The Drawing of the Three delves even more into American culture, as three members of the supporting cast are drawn from our own world of the '70s and '80s, and from the dysfunctional parts of our world at that: a heroin junkie, a woman suffering from multiple-personality disorder, and a pathological murderer. This assortment of characters says something itself about America, but we also see modern America through the gunslinger's eyes. Coming from a desolate world, we see how much we have in our nation and how we not only take it for granted, but are positively bored, depressed, and unimpressed by what we have, despite our abundance. Roland, the gunslinger, is a hard-nosed Romantic; he holds to noble ideals and his high purpose, his quest to reach the Dark Tower at the nexus of all that is, at the same time that he is relentless and pragmatic in his pursuit of it. Our world is shown as a cynical, purposeless place. 
 But of course, I don't think we can read this as King's statement on what America is, just one element of what America is. It is also the land of the hard-nosed Romantic, the world of rugged-individualist-as-hero. Roland is an American hero, and we see him in stark contrast to the unheroic elements of our own world. I could go on about this if I had time, but I don't just now. 
 I "read" this as an audio-book (it made the journey a bit easier, I'll tell you). Overall, it was well done. The reader (whoever he was) did voices for each character, and they seemed appropriate. He used a watered down version of each voice to narrate different sections, diffentiating by doing so which character was the focal point-of-view character in a given chapter. Good book, well read.