America the Beautiful?
One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled
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4.2 • 16 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Best Book of the Year —NPR, Vulture, Book Riot, B&N
"America the Beautiful? is so funny and special and illuminating that it makes even me, a person who cannot tolerate trees or weather, wish I could've tagged along in the back seat." — Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You. and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
The author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men examines Americans’ obsession with freedom, travel, and the open road in this funny, entertaining travelogue that blends the humorous observations of Bill Bryson with the piercing cultural commentary of Jia Tolentino.
For writer and comedian Blythe Roberson, there are only so many Mary Oliver poems you can read about being free, and only so many times you can listen to Joni Mitchell’s travel album Hejira, before you too, are itching to take off. Canonical American travel writers have long celebrated the road trip as the epitome of freedom. But why does it seem like all those canonical travel narratives are written by white men who have no problems, who only decide to go the desert to see what having problems feels like?
To fill in the literary gaps and quench her own sense of adventure, Roberson quits her day job and sets off on a Great American Road Trip to visit America’s national parks.
America the Beautiful? is a hilarious trip into the mind of one of the Millennial generation’s funniest writers. Borrowing her Midwestern stepfather’s Prius, she heads west to the Loop of mega-popular parks, over to the ocean and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and, in a feat of spectacularly bad timing, through the southwestern desert in the middle of July. Along the way she meets new friends on their own personal quests, learns to cope with abstinence while missing the comforts of home, and comes to understand the limits—and possibilities—of going to nature to prove to yourself and your Instagram followers that you are, in fact, free.
The result is a laugh-out-loud-while-occasionally-raging-inside travelogue, filled with meditations and many, many jokes on ecotourism, conservation, freedom, traffic, climate change, and the structural and financial inequalities that limit so many Americans’ movement. Ultimately, Roberson ponders the question: Is quitting society and going on the road about enlightenment and liberty—or is it just selfish escapism?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedy writer Roberson (How to Date Men When You Hate Men) quit her Late Show with Stephen Colbert job to visit national parks and—despite naysayers insisting she was "going to get murdered"—lived to tell the tale in this wobbly seriocomic travelogue. Taking her "Great American Road Trip" in the spring and summer of 2019, 30-something Roberson believed that "if I let myself be truly present, something alchemical might happen" to her generational malaise. She started at Lake Superior's Isle Royale, "the least visited national park in the contiguous United States," and awarded herself Junior Ranger badges along the rest of her odyssey, a gimmicky "organizing principle" that detracts from Roberson's more serious-minded considerations of global warming, the displacement of indigenous peoples, and how influencers cause overcrowding at national parks. Side trips to Los Angeles ("to take meetings") and art mecca Marfa, Tex., land less like unplugging and more like "I-hang-with-the-cool-kids" striving, and Roberson overall struggles to mold her experiences into a coherent narrative. She's undoubtedly funny and great on a line level, but jokes alone don't save this meandering memoir.
Customer Reviews
An easy way to visit the National Parks
Take a road trip with this practical author through many and many more National Parks. Learn little facts along the way. I wish there were a few pictures of the parks, maybe next time.