The last American road trip A memoir

Journalist Kendzior frequently discusses the political turmoil engulfing the U.S., as in her 2022 book, They Knew, and on her podcast, Gaslit Nation. Often using her perspectives as mother, journalist, and Midwesterner based in Missouri to discuss the issues facing the American public, Kendzior has again successfully leveraged those viewpoints in her memoir. The book is part travel tale and part political memoir, interweaving a love for her family and America's diverse destinations with her anger over the chaotic and troubling social, political, and environmental issues that have plagued a reeling, post-pandemic U.S. Kendzior tenderly details the many road trips shared with her husband and children, sharing stories ranging from mournful paranormal encounters in Arkansas hotels to delightful huckleberry indulgences in Montana. Each memory is accompanied by grief, anger, and incisive observations about the American political and social landscape, often cast alongside the author's own reflections on motherhood and child-rearing in an uncertain age. Readers who are already familiar with Kendzior's journalistic work will enjoy this equally diligent yet emotionally nuanced memoir. Readers of socially focused, personal nonfiction, such as Jessica Bruder's Nomadland (2017) or Sarah Smarsh's Heartland (2018), will also enjoy The Last American Road Trip.

In this impassioned account, journalist Kendzior (They Knew) documents her family's cross-country road trips in the late 2010s and early '20s. "I wanted the kids to appreciate all fifty states before propagandists tried to prejudice them," Kendzior writes. A native Missourian, she was rattled by news cycles about Trump, Covid, and climate change, and wanted her children "to know that even in the states notorious for political dysfunction, there are people and places to love." Throughout, Kendzior stitches together history, travelogue, and political analysis to deliver a trenchant defense of flyover country, even as she collects "new forensic evidence about who killed America." More than once, she humorously punctures her own self-seriousness: at a diner in Moab, Utah, for example, she recalls lecturing her kids about the grave impact the Supreme Court will have on their generation ("Your prologue will be an epitaph"), though their worries turned out to be more immediate ("Are we still having hot dogs?"). Kendzior keeps her alarmism mostly in check as she visits hidden gems across America, including the hoodoos of the Kansas plains and a temporary lake caused by heavy rains in Death Valley. It adds up to poignant portrait of life in the Trump era. Agent: Robert Lecker, Robert Lecker Agency. (Apr.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.