THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP

A journalist and her family trundle along America’s blue highways.

“There are no red states or blue states,” writes journalist and commentator Kendzior. “There are only purple states, purple like a bruise, and people trying to survive in a broken-promise land.” In her own purple state of Missouri, Kendzior makes a stand for ordinary people and her “love for day-to-day American life” while looking at some of their extraordinary accomplishments, from siring the writer who would become Mark Twain to building the St. Louis Arch honoring Lewis and Clark’s expedition. She digs deeper, unearthing lawsuits and grand engineering schemes along the Mississippi in which the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee took part before the Civil War. Her road trips are motivated by wanting to lend specific gravity to the historical past, to be sure, but also by her curious children, now teenagers, who over the years have become historians unto themselves, understanding the truly good things about America while sensing that the known future is going to be tough, a time of climate chaos and political unrest. Although Kendzior holds that “America is a diverse nation held together by disillusionment, not by binary categories that correspond to state lines,” she does allow that some places are less diverse than others: Branson, Missouri, for instance, an exemplar of generica that lies in Taney County, “named for Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who deemed Dred Scott less than human.” Most elegiac of all are Kendzior’s travels along Route 66, that historic mother road that will turn 100 in 2026 and is now rutted, boarded up, pulled onto the interstate in one detour after another, and generally depressing: “Route 66 is America,” she writes, “and America is falling apart.”

A graceful—and righteously angry—travelogue through a troubled land.