Wanderlust Book Club: The Last American Road Trip

Hi, it’s Vanessa, your ENLIGHTENMENT host,

I love to travel, and read books about other amazing places I love and would love to visit. I’m hoping there are other travelers, both active and armchair, who feel the same. So for us, here is the Wanderlust Book Club, which alternates every month with the California Club (books about the Golden State we live in).

Along with the book, I invite a special guest to each club meeting, someone who is an expert or very connected to the theme of the book and can answer our questions about the topic. So even if you haven’t finished / opened the book, you can still be part of the conversation.
Because it’s an election year, I picked a book that focuses on the Red/Blue divide in the U.S. We live in a beautiful country, but now even politics seems to get in the way of road trips. When I read a travel story in the New York Times about some cool-looking town or scenic attraction in the heartland, I also look at the “Reader Comments” section and see the most-liked comment is often something like, “I’ll never visit that state because they voted for Trump and they’re trying to ban [insert political issue] here.”

Is America’s Heartland going to hell ? Should we create our own version of a travel ban, just domestically? Or should we travel to these places — and take our kids — to show that our one nation is still undivided and worth saving?

That’s why I picked Sarah Kendzior’s memoir The Last American Road Trip. She uses her hometown of St. Louis, in the heart of flyover country, as the jumpstart for a road trip to show her two kids the grandeur of America before it is “too late.”

Along with discussing the book, I’m inviting professors of sociology and psychology to come talk with us about the book and how to view domestic travel in our very divided country.

Below is the book description. Join me at the Avid Reader bookstore on Broadway for a great talk .

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It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland—and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road—again and again.
Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events—the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic—reshape American life. They explore Route 66, national parks, historical sites, and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland. Together, the family watches the landscape of the United States—physical, environmental, social, political—transform through the car window.
Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future—even though at times she struggles to believe it herself.

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