Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Gage (G-Man) offers a gregarious travelogue turned history lesson, turned lesson on how history is made. Gage energetically crisscrosses the U.S., visiting museums, reenactments, and other commemorations of major events and developments since the country's founding. The narrative dances gracefully between Gage's recapping of the events themselves and her wry commentary on the sometimes silly, sometimes moving, but always weirdly American ways they have come to be memorialized: The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, for instance, is a $165 million "tent-themed odyssey" culminating in a "light show" around a tent that George Washington slept in; San Antonio, meanwhile, will soon open a museum featuring the Alamo collection of British rock star Phil Collins, who became the world's foremost collector of Alamo artifacts because he loved the Davy Crockett Disney show as a kid. Among the other topics covered are the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago; 1940s Los Alamos; and the 1955 opening of Disneyland. From her travels, she gamely draws the conclusion that "in every era, someone was sure that the moment of... collapse had finally arrived," but that Americans, filled with a unique "anxiety that the country's past might actually have been better than its future," never stop agitating for progress that lives up to the country's founding ideals. It's a marvelous deep dive into the American psyche. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Pulitzer Prize--winning historian hits the road to rediscover the nation's complicated past on the eve of its 250th birthday. In this expansive blend of travelogue, civic meditation, and cultural history, Gage (G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, 2022) trades the archives for the open road, visiting 13 regions where America has repeatedly defined, and redefined, itself. Beginning at Independence Hall and ending at Disneyland, she moves chronologically through two-and-a-half centuries of aspiration and contradiction. The concept is simple but effective: a road trip as metaphor for the American experiment, full of detours, breakdowns, and instructive wrong turns. Stops include the Alamo, Valley Forge, Chicago's Haymarket Square, and Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, each prompting reflections on how the stories we tell at historic sites both reveal and obscure national truths. "Traveling the country and learning about history can provide some existential comfort, since it shows that Americans have managed to get themselves out of big messes before. At the very least it makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever." A central theme, the possibility of loving one's country without overlooking its sins, resonates throughout: "Though you wouldn't necessarily realize it from the state of our political discourse, it's possible to hold both sets of ideas--to know your history and still love your country." Yet the book's genial, professor-on-sabbatical tone sometimes dulls its momentum; the narrative often feels like a series of polished essays more than a genuine journey. When Gage reaches California's Orange County, her sharpest insights emerge: Disneyland, she observes, "likes to flirt with the past but also to jumble it up and redefine it," a perfect emblem of American nostalgia as commerce. Despite the occasional flat stretch, Gage writes with clarity and moral conviction; her mix of curiosity, empathy, and civic faith feels both steadying and necessary. An earnest and gracefully written, if not especially revelatory, tour of America's contested memory. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
